Walter,

I agree that flowfields and sumindex technology is cool but enhances the user experience only not the development tool. But showing and hiding columns in grids and persistance through the ZUP file, I (and I am sure a *lot* of other VFP developers) have this and other intuitive GUI elements built into my (and their) framework(s). As for their proprietry database, its fast but we should have had memo's and record level locking, at least in the SQL implementation by now?

Having the objects built directly into the database is a nightmare and I will give you some critical examples:-

1] Multiuser development, if you have 2 developers and the first adds a table the second cannot see it until he closes his client and re-opens the database?

2] No source control, we have to export everything in a co-ordinated fashion as ASCII and then manually handle the checking in and out to gain *any* type of source control (in the loosest possible use of the term!).

3] Object updates from multiple developers.

We are at the tail end of a large implementation of Navision Attain for the British Government, I have had to create a lot of plumbing using VFP to do some of the simplest tasks.