>Roxanne,
>
>There's a lot more involved in the context switching between two EXEs than between the EXE and a DLL.
>
>Also DLLs can't have a UI of their own. So if the server needs a visible presence it should be and EXE.

So ok, I'm rethinking a piece of my VFP data warehouse application that I've been designing & planning forever. I was trying to formulate a question to hit my mentor with, which brought me here to make sure I knew what I was talking about (In Process vs. Out of Process). So let me toss out my thoughts and see what everybody thinks.

Let's say I have tables that get restocked (old data purged out and replaced with new data) during an overnight batch style run. After the restock process, other work is done to create new tables that are either normalized/denormalized version of what just got restocked. So my "source tables" get restocked, and my "pre-process tables" get rebuilt, and then a few error handling routines are run to make sure there are no errors in the data transfer. End of Batch Job. Now during the day, my users run a reporting app that uses all this data manipulated the night before. First thing they should do is print a system management report built by the error handling routine to make sure everything is good to go. Let's say they forget to do that, and they just go to running the regular reports. So the app needs to make sure or "verify" the necessary work was done the night before, and if it wasn't done then it has to call the appropriate routines and whatnot and do it right then and there before the report can be printed.

So original game plan for all this was separate exe's for batch work at night vs. reporting app. And what you all are telling me is this plan was Out of Process. Well I'm thinking now that once all this implementing, there's going to be a need for smaller apps to do data analysis/trending/adhoc reports and they will use the same data the big reporting app uses. These other apps will need to "verify" the nightly exe did it's thing the same way. (light bulb goes on) So I'm thinking to change my orignal design so that instead of building the "verify" process into the Report App, maybe I ought to make that an In Process DLL that I can re-use with the smaller apps that will come later. Does that make sense?