Hi Ryan,

>When VFP people say "databinding" they're almost always talking about 2-way binding where a control displays *and updates* data to and from the underlying dataset. In a VFP dbf application that can be achieved automatically using buffered tables or a local view. Even if you're already using 2.0 I'm surprised if you can match that in dotNET ;-)

Well, you can if you build it yourself, which is not very hard. Take a look here:

http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/aspnetdatabinding/aspnetdatabinding.asp

Several of us in from the Fox community have lobbied very hard to get more of VFP-like databinding into .NET, but unfortunately it has fallen on deaf ears. I think a lot of the people in charge of the data binding interfaces just didn't 'get it' (this was about 2 years ago). Both Windows forms and especially ASP.NET's native databinding is still primitive even in 2.0. Luckily .NET gives you the tools to improve the functionality and make it work the way you want to... In the end building my own actually results in something that is more flexible than what I can do in VFP.

And how do you do Web databinding with VFP? In WWWC or ASP classic? Well, ok WWWC has some tools that can make things easy if you know how. But ASP + COM has 0 tools for databinding, so even what little .NET 1.x does it's still a lot better than nothing.

>Well, I think there is a groundswell opinion that VFP does a great job of data manipulation- so much so that some of these features are making it to dotNET. I'm sure we both look forward to that.

Slowly some of the influence that Yag, Ken and the rest of the VFP team has is finding its way to the right people to affect changes. But unfortunately all of this is a long way off - certainly not in 2.0. This is mainly because of product cycles - YAG who's probably the biggest driving force, has been there just long enough where his input is starting to make a difference.