>>I'm having a little trouble understanding how VFP8 implements OLE automation. I'm kind of new to the subject itself, so forgive me if my question seems a bit stupid.<<

You need to define your class as OLEPUBLIC and then use createobject to create an instance:

DEFINE CLASS OleTest AS custom OLEPUBLIC

FUNCTION HelloWorld
RETURN "Hello World it is now "+TTOC(DATETIME())
ENDFUNC

ENDDEFINE

If you compiled this in an EXE calles vfptest you could then do

oMyOleServer=CREATEOBJECT("vfptest.oletest")
?oMyOleSever.HelloWorld()



Gary.