As Kevin stated in an earlier email on this subject, he's currently focusing his efforts on .Net but will work on VFP 8 enhancements when he's done with that.

I think there are a number of areas where MM could benefit from VFP 8 enhancments. I'll throw out a few, and I'd like to see what other people think:

IDE

Integrating much of the STANDARD menu functionality into the Toolbox

Elimination of Superclass from loading

Ability to store/list projects in either the Toolbox or the Task Pane and select desired project at statup, and have it load the MM environment as well (I have a homegrown version of this for 7 which works in 8, but it breaks a few things).

Code/Controls

Integration of the new grid. To me, this is one of the big things that we need. Kevin's old grids are good, and they were a great way to get around major grid deficiencies, but many of those deficiencies are handled extremely well with the new grid (i.e. highlighting a row).

Integration of the new collection class. I suppose that we could just start using this without any MM enhancements, but it would be nice to have a foundation MM class.

Other MM foundation classes, such as the XML class.

At first I thought that I'd like to see some sort of CursorAdapter solution as well, but I think the current data classes handle most of these issues, and in some ways are superior to the CursorAdapter class.

Data

Auto incrementing tables. The one issue I see with this is that setting the autoincrement feature makes those fields read-only, so how do you pre-fetch primary keys? I haven't played around with it, but if there is a solution, that would be nice. I'd love to get rid of the newid() code. It's not bad, but it does slow things down when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of records, and maintaining the ID table can be a pain.

I'm sure there's lots more. I'd love to hear people's ideas.

Take care,

David