SNIP
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>I know that people on the Fox team have spent a lot of time asking members of the community how they can make it easier for newbies to get up to speed. Autoincrement is one way.

Tamar,

I am for anything that makes it easier/faster/SIMPLER for newbies to get up to speed quickly with VFP. I certainly see auto-increment in this light.

Now the VFP Team has spent lots of time and money in the past on the sample apps, sample class libraries, foundation classes etc. These are typically IGNORED by the VFP Literati and so when a question on them arises there is little help available to the questioner in forums like these.

This is why I continue to bash away at the DOCUMENTATION content/format/quality. It is virtually guaranteed that a newbie, as well as most pros, will make use of the documentation.
We recently had a question here asking "what is a back-link?". Newbies don't have a prayer of understanding the simple and oft-repeated phrase in the documentation "scopes to the datasession'. There are SYS() functions stating that a Char. value is returned, but WHAT the value represents isn't stated. There are numerous similar examples and much missing information in the product documentation. They do get learned in the old school of hard knocks, but that is no way to ATTRACT and KEEP newcomers to the wonderful world of VFP. You can take it to the bank that countless newbies have TRIED out VFP and dropped it because they found it 'too complex'. There is only one reason for this - the quality of the documentation!

The VFP Team would be well advised to spend far less time and money on maintaining the samples/classes/foundation classes/etc and use that resource to radically re-work the documentation. I mean, you've had a Hacker's Guide for VFP3 way back when, yet perhaps a miniscule amount of the valuable information in there and the subsequent guides have made it into the product documentation. There's something wrong with that picture.

The VFP Team also has at its disposal the BUG REPORTS submitted by people all over the world. Any one of these that is ultimately answered by "working as designed" points directly to a deficiency in the documentation. KB Articles stating so are useful, but they should be considered as only an interim measure pending update of the documentation to clarify things.

The VFP Team has the capability to loosely track the frequency of similar/related questions in forums like this. This is another excellent source of learning what aspects of the VFP documentation may be lacking in clarity or completeness.

I understand that documentation is the least fun/glamorous of the steps of product delivery, but if one is intent on GROWING the user population then it cannot be denied that this is the key to doing so.

Cheers

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>Tamar