>Being old-school FP2.x and very new to VFP, I am considering Visual Foxpress as a RAD tool. I did use their FP 2.x version and was happy with that. Any opinions on the VFE tool?

I've been using FoxExpress and now Visual FoxExpress since the FP2.x days and remain very satisfied with the product. VFE5 was more like Codebook, but starting with VFE6, I think the framework drifted pretty far away from Codebook (thankfully). There is a bit of a learning curve, but I think you can get pretty far up the curve if you get the training CDs from the start. Here are some links describing the CDs...

http://www.f1tech.com/Training/VFEJumpstart/index.htm
http://www.f1tech.com/Training/VFEBuildingApps/index.htm

The second set was particularly helpful to me even after using the product several years. I found out that many things presented there are not discussed much on the support forum. You can get these CDs at a discount if you purchase them along with the product, so you might want to look into that.

VFE still has its own support forum, now at http://f1forums.f1tech.com/forums.cfm. I don't think you have to have purchased the product to read the messages, and there's a sales section where you can post a question similar to what you've posed here if you'd like.

Jeff Hibbs said you needed VFP9 to use the product, but that's not correct. I use the current version of VFE with VFP8 on one of my apps.

If you "buy into" the framework and program accordingly, VFE makes it very easy to move your data to SQL Server if you start it with DBFs. In fact, I did that very thing with my largest app. There is a feature called "dynamic view parameters" which I don't think you'll find an equivalent in any other framework. Very powerful. It allows your views to be much more flexible. Your data access will be with views, but if you're into using stored procedures, you can create a "scripted" view which allows you to, among other things, create a view based on the result set of a stored procedure. This allows you to use the data dictionary and create metadata for the stored procedures, as if it were an actual view. If you've not used views much, the Training CDs will help you with that.

With all of the above said, I have created a number of successful applications with VFE. I have nothing but positive things to say about it and F1 Technologies.