Jim

>great idea that zillions of independent pieces are way too hard
>to manage and control and that what is really needed is a product
>which has everything in one box. But I guess we have to go through
>the agony before we can reach that conclusion.

Yeah, there is certainly a section of the community that does not question the increasing complexity of IT and ask forcibly what the advantages are for us and clients... the sad thing is that there are some fairly ordinary people out there who know how to parrot what "the big boys" say and think that makes them clever. There are also the "techno-whiz" types who get all excited about the spinning bits and forget about outcomes, or the easier ways we've always known about. Never mind.

But in this case, IMHO there are very good reasons to utilise COM and to have multiple tools or specialised objects. At the risk of being flamed again, IMHO we are going to see a huge change in application development caused by COM, Javabeans et all. "Big bang" application vendors will be unable to keep up with small niche-players producing superb subsets of the requirement, with clients creating a "shopping bag" of preferred components that fit together. In this model, it doesn't matter whether people use VB, VFP, Visual Tea plus plus <g> or whatever, as long as they can share.

Regards

JR