>Thanks for that.
>
>As far as I know they have closed port 1433 so as to conserve bandwidth, that leaves us with web services
>
>Can I pass encrypted data using xml. when retrieving encrypted data from a vfp table one first needs to apply the CREATEBINARY() function to the data before it can be decrypted. Can I apply this concept to encrypted data from xml from a web service

Haven't tried this in a while, but I think thet VFP outputs Base64 encoded XML strings for fields marked as NOCPTRAN. Just make sure your cursor is created with NOCPTRAN (i.e. binary) character and memo fields, and you should be fine.