>>we are about to convert the first of a number of vertical market applications from VFP9 to .Net.
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>>We have 100's of clients, ranging in size from single pc, single user, through large corporation and upto Citrix based WAN networks.
>>The largest proportion of our clients have between 3 and 5 pc's in either a small server based network or a peer to peer network.
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>>My question is what database to use? Do we stick with VFP data for the smaller sites and use something else for the larger sites? or go for SQL Server across all clients? I have no knowlodge of SQL Server, but many years VFP. Does SQL Server have an advantage over MySQL? or are any of the others a good migration for a VFP knowledgable development team?
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>>Any thoughts?
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>One thing you should definitely consider is architecting your application(s) to be database agnostic. .NET makes this fairly straightforward using a provider pattern. .
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>Here is a link that will give you some more detail.
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>http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/.net/net_data/sortinganditerating/article.php/c9373
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>One important thing you will want to do a little differently, though, is to get the connection string from a config file, not hard coded like in the example. I believe the recommended file is Machine.Config but you can use any configuration file -- App.Config, Web.Config, etc. That way you can deliver the same code / EXE to all clients and all they have to do is change the config file.

FWIW - I usually use web or app.config. I figure a connection string should be local to the app, not global to the machine.