>>If it's not too much to ask, would you mind running the exact sequence of tests that I posted, so we can be reasonably scientific about this? I also asked Dragan to do that, and I would ask anyone else who thinks the behavior is variable to do this also.
>>
>
>I didn't follow all the steps in your message, but saw the same thing you saw after the first few steps, so I am sure I would duplicate the whole sequence.
>
>>No, I haven't yet played with the Object Browser, because it doesn't seem to have much relevance to the problem at hand, which is to examine an instance of a live object, not a static class definition. If I understand the concept correctly, the term "Object Browser" really seems like a misnomer for something that would be more aptly named a "Class Browser".
>>
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>Actually, I don't know how this works. It must use the getinterface() function somehow.
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>I am curious, what is the 'reason' for browsing a live OLE object? If you aren't doing it to know which properties and methods you need to access, which the object browser can show you...
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>>Barring any resolution of the problems I've seen in VFP's Debugger, the
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>Perhaps you should send your message to MS or even John Kozoil who said he 'loves' to get bug reports.
>
>BOb

Bob,

I tried your suggestion of looking at Word.Application, and got the same sort of results as I saw with IE. In fact, the VFP7 Debugger seems to reveal even less about the Word object structure than the little it showed me of IE's Document object. I also spent some time looking at the Object Browser, which only confirmed my expectation that this is not a suitable alternative.

I wonder if we're talking about the same thing, when you say, in reference to Word, that "it lets you expand it and see all the methods right away". I'm not talking about Intellisense, methods, or snippets of documentation. I'm looking at an instance of an object to see the values of its properties, and the member objects that it actually does contain, not those it might. If you were a chemist, would you be satisfied with a copy of the periodic table? Wouldn't you want to examine some actual examples of real chemical compounds? If you were studying to become an auto mechanic, would it suffice to have a detailed catalog of parts and their specifications, without actually examining an instance of a car? Why should it be necessary to type in a separate command line to display each property individually, when VFP clearly knows this information and has an appropriate interface, the Debugger, that is supposed to display it all at once?

Whether it's a Word document or a web page, these objects are potentially so complex and varied that it can make a huge difference what tools one uses and how. Intellisense and Object Browser are fine accessories for writing code, but poor substitutes for straightforward use of the Debugger if my objective is simply to peruse some real examples of object structures. Of course, that presumes that the Debugger actually works, which I now understand is not the case.

I'll follow your advice and post a VFP bug report to John's attention shortly.

Mike