Rod,

>This is what I propose to begin with...

>I will need help from someone to create the VFP code. I'll handle the .NET end of things.

>Who would like to volunteer?

I would love to, however, I'm stuffed with regular work. I simply can't free some time to do this. Maybe at some other time.

>Database (I will provide a download to a sample database)
> A customer table with 1,000,000 records in it.
> This data will be stored in SQL Server and a VFP DBC
>
>Retrieve data from a datasource.
> .NET will use SQL Server as its data source
> VFP will use the DBC natively.

Please don't compare apples with oranges. There are a lot of pitfalls in here, and I'm quite sure that the results for a simple applications would be fairly simular. VFP can use both SQL - Server and DBC. If the resultsets are rather small, I don't see any reason why a .NET application would be far slower than a VFP application in this respect, except for the time it needs to start up. About all tricks you can use in .NET to speed up thing you can do in VFP as well. The other way arround however, is a different matter (see Message #1081192)

>Filter that set of data based on some criteria.
>1. A simple search screen that allows a user to query the customer data by
>a. Lastname and firstname – sorted by lastname, firstname
>b. Zip Code and Last Name
>
> User should be able to subselect the data once it is in the client
> By state would be a good example of this.

Such as (Not tested),

SELECT cusstate, Firstname, Lastname, SUM(ISNULL(orl_amount,CAST(0 as int))
   FROM Customers 
      LEFT JOIN Orders ON ord_cusfk = cus_pk 
      LEFT JOIN Orderlines ON orl_ordpk = orl_ordfk 
   WHERE Firstname LIKE 'Wal%'
   GROUP BY cus_pk, firstname, Lastname, cus_state
   ORDER BY cus_state, 3 DESC

Kidding aside, of course this is something you'd run against the backend, not locally. But it raises an interesting point. In VFP, the solution is very much the same whether you run it through the backend or locally. Why the hell do we've got an alien DML in ADO.NET a developer has to learn specifically for .NET?

Walter,