>Don't get too excited. There are a few reasons to be less than thrilled with VFP's position as a middle-tier tool:

I agree with your other points...but I feel that VFP 6.0 went a long way past 5.0 to close the gap. I really think/hope that if M$ didn't have any plans for VFP, they would have scrapped it with 5.0.

>4. Unlike VB, only a single user can access a VFP COM object at once. If multiple requests are received, all but the first will be blocked meaning that VFP really processes the requests serially.

For a in-process DLL that's currently true. But for an out-of-process EXE that's not true. I saw an EXE COM server handle 3 threads simultaneously via FOXISAPI...it having been pooled...and the number 3 is not a maximum value.