>I have to develop an application to deliver to end clients. I developed it access with the runtime but the final project was too large, over 100 megs and end users has conflicts with other office projectes. Its a small relatively easy project.
>
>In access I can do this in about a day. It has now taken me a month in Foxpro (granted I am learning all of the new basics and with the crappy documentation out the learning curve is hugh).
>
>My question, Why doesn't microsoft take access or develop a product like it and allow it to compile to a single small executable? Ughhhhhhhh


The way I see it, Access is more oriented towards the end-user, Visual FoxPro, towards programmers. What this means in practice is that with Access you can develop applications quickly, without learning advanced programming concepts, but then, when you want to do something advanced, you are stuck.

With Visual FoxPro, you have to learn a lot more, but then you also have much more power.

There are indeed quite a few things that are more complicated in Visual FoxPro (not that I know a lot about Access, BTW). For example, to create a simple application that only shows a single form that does nothing at all takes quite a few steps.

The built-in framework (application wizard) is worthless, except as a demo of how you can do certain things. To develop applications quickly, I would suggest to get a good third-party framework, to help you build your applications. For example, I use Visual Extend; but there are several others, like Mere Mortals (quite popular among Universal Thread participants), Visual ProMatrix, etc. These are commercial frameworks; some freeware frameworks are available too, like CodeBook and TierAdapter.

Note that you must still know the basics of Visual FoxPro; these frameworks save you some detail work, but they don't entirely relieve you from programming.