Hi Calvin.

>Our company creates and sells vertical market apps mainly in the used car market. All of our customers are on local networks (peer to peer mainly) or even single machines. We are currently using VFP 7 and my question is - What would be the benefits,if any, of moving to VFP 8? I understand that the developer interface is somewhat better but I am more concerned about benefits on the customer side.

Tons of client-side benefits:

- If they use Windows XP, VFP 8 support themes.

- If you use grids in your application, there are a lot of grid enhancements, including auto-fitting columns, locking columns, and true row highlighting.

- Features like event binding make it easy to create forms in which the controls resize themselves when the form is resized.

- Report designer improvements make it possible to display Page X of Y, stretchable fields in the page header and footer, and chainable reports

- If your app supports exporting to Excel, you can now export up to 65K records rather than 16K in earlier versions

- The index doubling bug in VFP 7 was fixed, so indexes are now smaller, meaning tables open faster over networks

- If you hit non-VFP data using ODBC, the ability to share connections means fewer licenses of a backend database may be needed

- If a table header is corrupted in such a way that no error occurs but new records aren't properly written to the table (a problem I know you've been bitten by), VFP 8 now gives an error when the table is opened.

I could go on and on, but hopefully you see that VFP 8 isn't just about developer improvements, but has a lot of great features for end-users as well.

Doug