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>I think the second-tier stuff beats it all. It sounds like one those crazy ideas someone comes up with and all of a sudden it becomes company policy because it "sounds great". And when this company is called Microsoft, you're in for a lot of joy, because like Brittania, it rules ...
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It's not that VFP is a bad 2nd-tier, it's just like selling a car with the claim that it has nice seats.

>By the way, do you remember the days when we were all going to make dll's? Untill well .dll was not that great an idea, well maybe noboddy will notice if we call it OLE and later OCX. Component progamming is not going to work everywhere in all circumstances, even M$ cannot change that. This is a basic design issue is it not? Components should have a minimum critical mass, otherwise interfacing will become more complex. If this sounds familiar ...
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>John, can you picture it? A project leader assigning tasks from the crc cards. Mmm let's see this one is a first tier class, let us give it to Joe our VB specialist, and this one, ah that one is for Alfred, our "VFP genius". He'll probably need a VB/VFP interface librarian and most of all a schrink, but then the shrink is probably an overlooked necessity in today's programming teams anyway :).

In practical terms, I would agree with you. Most developers tend to go towards one tool or at most two (front-end and database). This especially applies to VB people who are really caught up in their own little world frequently.

Now where it does work is on a project team where the project leader has strong technical leadership and vision and can blueprint out the components for the development team. Also, development methodology is important and wrappering interfaces between components has to be carefully thought out.