>But I guess that you've got to be very careful where you draw the line in the balancing act between commercial pressures (and competiveness) and a sound system setup.

Steve,

That is exactly my point. Could not have said it so well myself!

But in our discussion on the future of VFP, we should take this into account, M$ are you listening?:). This ability to combine robust, state of the art core systems with quick and dirty fixes and still have satisfied clients is I think the one and most important feature of VFP. One would be hard pressed to find this combination in any other language that each have other advantages. OK that is probably a subjective view from my personal experience, but face it, there _are_ other products around to do more rigourously, shall I cosher?, systems.

So why complain? Because that is not where M$ is taking VFP, if it is taking it somewhere. What we need is a much better interface, Gino, on that account we are on the same wavelength. Half of the time we spend on our projects is lost on things that could have been fixed if the guys who wrote the (mostly visual) interface would have had more time (yes I am being diplomatic here).

VFP is not the language where you will write the state of the art systems, so we might as well have a tool that helps us help our clientèle in the real world, where face it, OO is not the cure to every day problems, but the ability to change things quickly and still have the system running. FPD was perfect for this. VFP is still the best.

So enough enhancement of the functionality. What is there should be improved in VFP7. It is too late anyway for VFP to compete with VB or Java anyway for Web applications. I'm sure you can do everything that is in the book with VFP, but will you?

Marc