OK, this makes sense to me now. It think it is an XP thing. I using Win2K but I'm about to buy a new machine so I guess it is time to make the XP switch. I just dread the pain it will be to get everything up and reloaded. Maybe the fast machine will ease that pain. Thanks for the response.


>>I'm dumb. What do you mean by "clean control presentation" Tell me what to look at to see exactly what you are talking about.
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>I am using XP - it may be different in Win 2K. I have thought for a while that the 3-D "special effect" was a little dated looking. I entertained the "flat" control feature in VFP 6 (and 7), but it didn't fare well either.
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>A few nights back, I was fiddleing with an idea for a GUI, and built a little evaluation form in VFP - 8. The controls, combo, textbox and even list box sliders looked tasteful, minimal and kind of 'fung sway'. In fact, the IE6 / UT toolbar has a combo (More:). If you are using XP, the VFP 8 combo defaults to an appearance similar to the combo on our UT Toolbar. Not 3-d, and not home-made-flat, but cool, contemprary and relaxed.
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>It's pretty subjective - maybe its that egg-shell sky-blue border and button color.
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>I also noticed that the Command buttons have Hot Tracking (I only just learned about that after reading Martin's article)which seems to suit my current minimalist attitude!
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>You can even see the difference by running a VFP-6 form inside VFP-8. Are you using XP? That might be the difference if your projects are still throwing 3-D controls in VFP-8. My desktop is set as "XP Style".
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>PS - I use the word "tasteful", but have no idea what it means:~).
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>>>>>Wow - that is a tasteful GUI. Until this point, I was just running little PRGs and COMs (no GUIs) and reading the help files. I wrote a little demo GUI and was left a little breathless. With all the other stuff VFP 8 has to offer, I did not even consider the look and feel of the form and control presentations. Just needed to say - it looks great! Cudo's fox folks! Thanks.
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>>>>I made a simpler test that blew our minds off here.
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>>>>Our apps have a quite complex architecture where a single BizObj instantiate a lot of child objects. This is particularly heavy in an option that used to take about 25 seconds in VFP 7 due to the vast tree of objets.
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>>>>I just recompiled the module where this option is and the related components. No single line of code was changed. I tried that option and it took a couple seconds to instantiate.
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>>>>Now that's *really* cool! 8-)
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>>>I noticed the instanciation was significantly faster too. But I just did not expect such a clean control presentation. This stuff is really amazing!