I just talked to Calvin Hsia about this, he is our lead developer on the Fox team at Microsoft. This is not a bug, this is by design. Or more to the point, a limitation with COM object instances their interfaces. In COM, there is no such thing as a property. Everything is a method call. For the “property” foo, there are 2 methods: get_foo() and set_foo(). In order to do what you are requesting, the actual COM object property get_ would have to be invoked, which can have side-effects. The author of the server could run *any* code in these methods, which could change the state of the COM object.

The VFP debugger (or any COM debugger) cannot change the behavior of the object being inspected. The VFP debugger does not make method calls to retrieve values. IntelliSense on COM objects works by interpreting COM TypeInfo which can be provided statically using a type library or provided dynamically by the server. This is not a bug in the IE WebBrowser control either, it is by design as per the interface define in the class used for that control. This explanation explains why you see slightly different behavior in the debugger and IntelliSense with various COM object instances.