Its one of the few things that VFP does that is difficult to impolement in .net. So its the defining point for sticking with VFP in John's mind.

I "saw the writing on the wall" and took steps to abandon VFP long before you did, John. I came back because certain features in VFP offered a clear delivery advantage. The most recent comparison work involved Stored Procedures and local datasets in middle tiers using NET. It wasn't as good. If it was as good, I wouldn't have to waste my time keeping the issue visible when others make blanket statements about NET, would I.

You act as if you never used disk spanning in FP. If you used SQL-Select or USEd a decent sized table in VFP, you used disk-spanning. I agree that it was seamless and invisible, but you need to dig deeper than that. Recast your vfp experience and its use of disk-spanning. What parts were simply habit? What parts are easily replaced by a small C/S query or are better handled in a SP? What parts were remarkably easy if you could create a series of large local collections and relate them all together for analysis or reporting? Rather than relying on simple mantras like "SP is always best", consider which machine makes most sense to perform that sort of work and whether indeterminate-size datasets have any role in that.

After that, you may still come up seeing no value in disk-spanning, but at least you'll have something to contribute apart from a personal attack. ;-)