It may not be a big deal to you, but it is to me.

A Visual FoxPro User Group buddy of mine, Larry Koska, contacted me recently and asked me to confirm his suspicions. I immediately told him, "I agree, you ARE ugly." While this may be true (he's gonna squash me like a bug the next time he sees me), it wasn't what he wanted to confirm.

It seems that tool tips for objects in a grid that have been previously working flawlessly are no longer visible. Would I run his form and see if I got the same results? Sure, but, all knowingly, I reminded him that I shouldn't have to "waste" my time because (undoubtedly) what had happened was that the ShowTips property of the form on which the grid resides probably got accidentally reset to .F..

"No, dummy, (Larry and I clearly have a mutual admiration society going on), I am not that stupid. That was the first thing I checked."

My response then was, "Lar, this may actually be a problem. Let me check it out."

And so the mini test began. I fired up his form and everything worked as expected. I could see tool tips specific to the grid, to the columns, and even the column headings. And yet, I had to believe that Larry knew what he was talking about; he usually does. So, why would the form work on my machine and not his? What recent changes might he have made? A quick phone call determined the difference. Both of us are running VFP9, both of us have access to Vista OS and XP OS and tested on both OSs. The only apparent difference is HE (always on the bleeding edge of technology) is running Service Pack TWO  and I (invaribly on the coaggulating edge) am running Service Pack ONE. To confirm, he reinstalled using SP1 and the exact same form work as expected. Mystery solved. Now I am going back and review a recent blog by Rick Schummer (April 8, 2009) to make sure this bug gets reported properly.

Getting tool tips to display may not seem that big of a deal, but if I didn't want them to be displayed, I wouldn't have gone to the bother of creating them. I am glad to see that Larry, as a developer, followed through rather than re-evaluate the need for tool tips. Besides, as quite often happens, I learned something and because I worked on it, I will remember this issue. Subsequently, a Google search did discover a discussion of this issue and that MIGHT have saved us time, but in the long run, I believe it was more beneficial to have gone through the discovery process ourselves. Afterall, it is all a big game and isn't that what we developers like best?