>>My understanding of about the best you could achieve with VFP and multi-tier is a tier-1 of VFP, a tier-2 of VFP in-process (DLL) server (that is, VFP 2nd tier residing on same system as client, and a non-VFP thrid tier. The non-VFP thrid tier would be the DB component and something supported by MTS (or
>whatever did the trick).
>
>Well...
>
>If I were going to do a 3-Tier... the middle tier would have to be an out-of-process automation server so that it could be on a remote machine. Whats the use of doing three tier if the middle-tier run runs on the same machine as the client tier?

well, one advantage is that you can abstract your business logic from the forms. using an inprocess server (or so I've read ...) on the client machine will give you a fast enough "connection" between tier 1 and tier 2 that you can call methods like oBizObj.SetCustomerName( this.Value) from the valid event of a control with good performance. my understanding is that the overhead associated with out-of-process server communications makes such field-level validation is poor design approach.

my info comes from the following white paper to be very useful: Scalable ...
> I might as well do two tier (front end/back end) in that case.
>
>Thanks for your comments.
>
>BOb

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Mark Bucciarelli