>>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.
>
>The difference between InProc and OutOfProc on the UI level is not llikely
>to be an issue.
>
What if the servers are stored on some machine on the other side of a WAN connection? Wouldn't inproc be faster than outofproc?

{stuff deleted ...}
> whether you're actually running
> an external object or whether your implemententing the same object internally
> (as long as can easily be externalized) still gives you a multi-tiered
> architecture.

Good--you like our current approach! (The COM buzz is seductive . . .) This is the decision we arrived at when we discovered that a COM object doesn't have access to a forms private data environment. The issue of connecting to data is pretty intimidating. So, we're just putting in our business rules in the objects and assuming the form will handle things like multi-user conflicts and so on. (That's enough for now, thanks very much!!)