Neil,

Nice to hear some feedback about navision developer experience.

>I agree that flowfields and sumindex technology is cool but enhances the user experience only not the development tool.

Well, these make thing possible with good performance which are not possible in straight VFP. IMO, Navision has a good advantage here.

>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?

Showing and hiding columns in VFP still is a troublesome thing. You cannot simply hide a column: you can only make its width 1 and move it to the end of the columnlist. However you're not able to hide the 1 pixel wide colummnline with becomes a visual nightmare when hiding more than one or two columns. I hope to see this change in VFP 8.

As for the limitation of the database, sure I don't like the standard solution of storing remarks in lookup tables as replacement of memofields.

>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!).

I'm not sure what you mean by that. You can use object modules for that can't you ?

>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.

Having simular experiences I regarded this as problems that are technical fixable. IMO, the objectstable still is a very appealing feature in many ways. No executable to build and changes can be made while no-one has to leave the application as long as they don't want to use the new objects.

Walter,