> Hi Rich,

> Thanks for the update on your progress. It's great to know you are so committed to solving
> the report writer problems so many of us VFP developers (including yourself) have struggled with for years!

> I hope you didn't feel like I was trying to "step on your toes" with my annoucement of this
> other OCX I found. Please accept my apologies if I did in any way.

> Do you have an estimated time frame for the release of the design control in either a beta or final version?

> Paul

Hi Paul,

No apology necessary! It's alwasy good to know about the competition. That's what keeps me "On my toes"! <bg>

I would say at current pace it will be January before I release a really good BETA due to Holiday stuff and flu season. I am hoping to have a good release in February if not sooner. The Designer doesn't have near as much detail work as the Report Preview Control has had. Plus a lot of the technology has already been designed and coded in the Report Preview that is used in the Report Designer. At Devcon most of the MS VFP Team I showed my product to, said that I should be selling it! I was a little concerned when I had heard that there updates to the Report Writer in VFP 8 until I got to see it at Devcon. What a relief!

Did you run the code that I posted up here to check out the Designer that's in work?

If you want, I can also send you Alpha releases of the control to play with to so you can give me early feedback. Doug Hennig has already been giving me great feedback because he would like to use it with his Stonefield Query.

I know from watching this post that others have had the same issue when trying to distribute Runtime Report Designers to their clients as well and that is that they might want one until they have to use it. That has been my experience as well. Yours too! However, I know a lot of things that with what I can do would make my life a lot easier at making reports.

I did post a new update to my control last night that now adds in FlateDecode Compression in my PDF documents with only about a 10 to 20% hit in performance as well as crunching one of my test reports from 4988KB down to 974KB. So that's good news. Plus I added a JUSTIFY directive which supports both Left and Right Justify on a paragraph of text in a STRETCH WITH OVERFLOW Report Expression. I just need to update the Help File. I can't keep up with that part of it. Plus you know how it is, most developers I think hate writing documentation.