Hi christof,

>Terminal Servers are a good solution because they reduce administration and easily allow working from a remote location or at home. When you develop for Terminal Server make sure that you have a terminal server of the same version available for debugging. VFP applications behave slightly different on TS than on a regular machine, and hence require additional testing. A few of the issues I found are:

>- Terminal Server on NT and Windows 2000 only support 16 colors. Windows pretends to support 256, but those are rastered from the 16 colors. If your application changes colors or use images, you need to test your application for usability.

Huh, I don't know how you came to that conclusion, but my W2K TS is actually using 256 colours, as well as those of my clients. When using a 3rd party image control like Leadtools, you can even display high colour images reasonably (256 paletted colours dithered).

>- Some ActiveX controls can only run as a single instance on a machine like older versions of Graphic Servers. They cannot be used in Terminal Servers.
>
>- Do not consider any version below VFP 8. VFP 7 and 6 still have too many bugs in their TS support.

Unfortunately VFP8 has some bugs too. VFP 7 handles images reasonably dithered on TS. Images displayed in VFP 8 are worthless (BUG) as they are non dithered using the 16 basecolours. This is the main reason for me to go to a 3rd party image control.

>- If you use API function that create global objects like semaphores or mutexes, etc., you need to put a "Local\" or "Global\" (case-sensitive!) in front of the name, depending on whether you want to control something on the user or machine level. This is required in Windows 2000 upwards but causes an error in Windows NT. Make sure you test the OS version.

I won't reccomend using NT 4.0 anymore. Microsoft is not supporting the OS anymore (?) and many vendors are phasing out support for it (Pegasus imaging, Crystal Reports). The requirement for running our software currently is Win2K or WinXP. Depending on the components used in the software we are willing to support Win98 (under resctrictions), but that is about it.

Walter,