>>>Who is behind StrataFrame? From their web site it seems like they have some sort of VFP connection. I also noticed the testimonial on the home page from Gary Wynne, whose name we remember here, saying what an aid StrataFrame was when they rewrote their mission critical app ;-(
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>>( why the sad face on the last sentence? Isn't that Bonnie's husband? )
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>No, that's Gary DeWitt. Gary Wynne is in England.

Sorry. Of course. I remember Gary doing excellent presentations on using MSDE instead of DBFs to keep a single code base that would scale. First glimmerings of writing all my stuff against a SQL backend - didn't pick up on it right away but definitely had me going in the right direction 5 or 6 years ago.

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>>the company is MicroFour. They've been around about 20 years - mostly doing medical record and practice management software in foxpro. They seem to have done very well at that. A much bigger operation that i would have guessed from the website.
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>>When they decided to move to .NET they found the available frameworks wouldn't do what they wanted with the size of the record sets they were dealing with so they wrote their own framework, which is now used for their commercial app and which has obviously benefited from being both developed and stress tested against real business needs. (the enterprise server is *very* cool) And they speak very fluent Fox.
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>>The founding generation (three Taylor brothers and a sister) is close to my age - and yet have degrees in CS (oddly enough the U in Amarillo offering one of the first CS programs west of Rockies). The younger gneration - led by Trent Taylor and Ben Chase (32 and 25 respectively) represent as much mental horsepower as I've ever seen in 2 people. Stuff that's already wired into framework far exceeded what I expected and made me realize just how far I would have been from that kind of productivity without it. And since they are using and expanding it daily I've seen very large extension just in the last year.
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>>Working with Mike and Toni for the last ten years has given me a pretty good look at a top notch framework development team and I think I know this stuff when i see it.
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>>The Microfour team also happen to be really nice people and since it's a family business there is a lot of stability. I have enthusiasticly drunk the kool-aid, obviously, but I like to speak kindly of things I really believe in and the more i get involved with Microfour and SF the happier I am about it.
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>The enthusiasm is appreciated and you have gotten my attention. One more question, if you don't mind. It may be answered on their web site but I haven't found it yet. It says you get the source code. What language is it written in?

Source is in VB. You only need it for reference of course as you can subclass in C# if you want to change behavior. In the class at Dow Jones last week everything was done in C# and worked exactly like the stuff I'd seen the week before in VB. All examples in the training materials were in both languages and I would say about half of the developers on the SF forum are using C#.

A very cool thing I learned in class, by the way, that I'm playing with now is loading multiple business objects on one trip to the server. One stored proc in SQL, one simple procedure in the bizobj and 10 bizobjs are filled in one trip.

Their Data Deployment Toolkit is like Stonefield for SQL. Deploys your UDFs etc. Writes CRUD procs for you, if you like. Manages schema with SMO and deploys setup data etc. Very slick.