>I've already left the MS camp once ;-) and hesitate to do so again. IMHO MS has done us all a HUGE favor by keeping this thing going long after the prophets predicted doom. Now we just need to see what Linq offers. It seems unfortunate that the latest announcement came before many/most of the improvements were publicly delivered. That's why I think the NET compiler has value. Apart from allowing VFP firms to defend themselves from competitors trashing the product, it allows time to check NET out as it continues to evolve. I don't share your concerns about the compiler's local data engine: apparently it already has one that breaks the 2Gb and 254-field barriers as well, if that's useful.


Well, I've been spending a bunch of time with LINQ over the last few weeks and it's a mixed bag. It does some seriously cool stuff, but it also has many limitations the worst of which is that dynamic query results cannot be passed out of a local method unless you explicitly cast the result to a specific type. IOW, truly dynamic queries with dynamic non pre-determined field lists (or field lists that haven't been mapped to object definitions first) cannot be passed out of the current method - as you would typically do from within a business object. I think that particular issue will become a show stopper for many scenarios actually.

Which compiler? The CLR you mean? LINQ uses memory based data for holding results - everything is piped into collections/arrays AFIK...

+++ Rick ---