David,

>What's so wrong about the statusbar ActiveX control that Windows itself uses?

Much....

1. If you put it in a MDI container form, and you maximize the MDI child, the MDI child covers the statusbar.

2. You cannot put the ActiveX statusbar in the VFP main form.

3. Though you can put it in a toolbar and dock it at the bottom of the window, Its troublesome to resize the statusbar and keeping the statusbar on the bottom, especially when you try to dock another toolbar beneath it

4. You've to provide a mechanism to show the statusbar text in the ActiveX statusbar. You can do this by SET STATUS ON, use a desktop form (with alwaysonbottom=.t.) and capturing the _VFP.statusbar, but its troublesome and a dirty method. You also have to take care of messages like "Invalid date" which in general lock up your application this way, and some system Windows menu bars like "Cascade" and "Arrange all".

In short, Though I've used it succesfully in a few applications. It's a troublesome thing to handle. However it was the only way for pre VFP8 applications to hide specific VFP system messages from the statusbar.

I guess, many VFP developers don't want to hassle with these kind of problems and just SET STATUS BAR OFF, Because using the ActiveX Statusbar just does not cut it.



Walter,