>Martin, the 1-tier application I was describing here isn't (necessarilly) mine. It is a hypothetical (or not) application. But I'm sure many 1-tier apps exist in the world. So, I guess there are many companies out there who are, as you call it, in deep trouble.

Yes, I understood that, and I know many of this companies.

>I really had some hope that you would gonna sketch a simple way of dealing with such apps. But your proposed way of dealing with them is far more sophisticated. I understand the advice, but the sophisticated path is in this case not a simple path. It is an endeavour. Developers and companies should be aware of that. Serious consequences indeed.

I know this is not a simple task, but there are no magical way to rebuild a complex application to a better architecture and an improved design. I dedicate quite a lot of time to help people doing that. You may read some of my articles the last few years in UT Magazine about that. Of course they don't cover everything, but I try to give as much pointers as possible for further reading/learning.

For more in-depth and practical guidance, I frequently present sessions at Microsoft, user groups and other events. And believe me, most of the problems you mention are not VFP-only issues. I helped people redesign applications written in VFP, Java, VB6, C++ and even .NET. There is no single platform that ensures you make the things right, and many application tend to show huge scalability, maintainability or performance problems after some time if it is not properly handled.

As they say, there is no free lunch. I try to help people do it better. Far from perfect, of course. I'm not genius. I just failed many more times than other people, so I learned about lots of mistakes the hard way.

Regards,