>For exmaple, I am often amazed to see people here post elaborate questions on how to do FTP or SMTP mail..
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>It's been a while since you sat down with and end-user's agent and discussed development of a custom bean counter, accounting or inventory control.
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>Thank Akila on a stack of Tikees that Quickbooks and ACC-PAC leave space in the Market for vertical application developers like me!
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>I am still surprised when I hear developers talk about grids (ListViews, in my opinion - are better) or "VCR" buttons (with a treeview or listview the slider is active - not snap to - faster than clicking a VCR Button) - but - I still see good apps with grids and VCRs that do a [surprisingly] decent job of servicing the user interface.
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>In some cases, FTP is a lot more than just getting a file from here to there. For example, Bloomberg Financials has a cheap seat service using FTP. Bloomberg does offer a license that includes a console and a broadband connection that gives users realtime access to their financial database. This service cost about 2000$/month/console. What is interesting about this service is that the help screen (WAPI) includes an article on how to implement Bloombergs OCX connect to this service with VFP!
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>Bloomberg also has the cheap seat. It works like this: The user creates a precisely formatted text document listing the securities and the data they want for those securities. Once the list is complete, the user FTPs the list to a Bloomberg server. The bloomberg server picks it up, collects the return data into a CSV, computes a bill, encrypyts the CSV and then parks it in the users folder on the Bloomberg server. The user then logs in to the server and FTPs the encrypted CSV back. decripts it and parses to a document container (like Excel) to work with it.
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>I wrote an accounting system that I needed to [also] sell to the "cheap-seats". To to this - I had to completely automate the FTP request service begining with formatting the request file, FTPing the request to the "Bloomberg", autopolling the server to see if the return document was available. FTP back the finished encrypted file, decrypyt it and parse the data into the accounting files of the system I wrote, and parse the billing to a third party AP system. The data is expensive. For example the "price" of certain types of bonds can cost as much as 3$ a pop. Multiply that by several thousand "bonds" and you get the picture.
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>This is something that could not be solved simply by downloading a WC FTP client or CuteFTP. If anything - I have learned there may be a lot more behind the questions a developer asks on this board than meets the eye.
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>The truth maybe that we're simply not "just" ftp-ing, or not "just" doing meat and taters cgi or smtp. There is a lot more to the projects than you may imagine. I would guess it's been a while since you had to hook data to a treeview or calculate an average cost for a bill of materials or collect readings from analog converters!
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>You need to get out in the field more more - talk to old ladies in a damp mill-dewed office and convince her that she needs to pay your price to replace the "Pick/Xenix" solution her office purchased 25 years ago. We're doing a lot more with foxpro than we did back in the daze of 2.1 and 2.6. So - please - have mercy on us muggles - we need answers to simple questions - and don't want to bore you with the details of the whats and whys of the project.!

This one is out of the main topic.

Terry,

Did you work in the "Pick" environment?

I never thought I'd see PICK mentioned here ever <g>

My first real programmer's job was with PICK.

Do you know if it's still used a bit in the USA?