Thanks Paul...


>I'm sure a lot of people might suggest leveraging some of your existing VFP knowledge and use VFP in the middle tier. It makes a certain amount of sense and I can understand where they are coming from. However, you end up paying a performance hit for that, have to deal with the extra complexity of COM components, the difficulty of debugging in mixed environment, the extra work required for a decent type library from the VFP side, etc. From what you've mentioned, you're already looking at doing a full rewrite. I'd go for a full C#/SQL app. Remember, you don't have to do all of the data handling in .NET - you can leverage stored procedures in SQL for more complex operations.
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>I'd go straight for third party UI controls for a desktop app. The stock controls in .NET just feel clunky to me. For example, Dev Excpress or Infragistic's controls.
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>If you go this route, just like in a VFP app, I'd suggest looking into a .NET framework: Mere Mortals.NET, IronSpeed, Strataframe, or one of the ORM tools such as LLBLGen Pro, Wilson ORMapper, NHibernate, etc. Some people are of the opinion that you shouldn't use a third party framework until you've learned "the hard way" to do it. For me, it's much more important to be productive first, let the framework keep me from shooting myself in the foot because of the things I don't know, then learn the details. YMMV, though. At a bare minimum, look at the design of each and pick out the things you like.
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>It's also probably going to take longer than you expect. If it's a 10 year old app., there is a good chance that the business rules are very complex. Don't underestimate how long it will take to understand what/why your existing code is doing, and deciding if that functionality is even needed in the rewrite. You're also going to be dealing with the learning curve of .NET (getting the basics down should happen pretty quickly, though).
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>Have fun.