>>Hi All -
>>
>>I am at a fork in the road and would appreciate some thoughts on which way to go. I have a VFP 9 desktop application. The data is also served to the web via an ASP.NET application. For a variety of reasons we are moving the data into SQL Server (primarily for the web app and because other staff here don't want to bother to learn VFP). My desktop users would like to continue to use the VFP frontend but I have never done a split frontend/backend project. So I am faced with these options.
>>
>>1. Convert the VFP project to use the SQL Server as the backend.
>>2. Write a new VB or expand the ASP.NET web app to provide the desktop functionality.
>>3. Continue to maintain the VFP project as is and maintain the data in 2 databases (VFP and SQL Server).
>>
>>It seems like the first choice is the best but since I am unfamiliar with handling SQL Server from VFP I am a little uncertain as to how much work this would be. Most of the desktop app is querying. There is only very minor editing. However once a year there is a major addition to the data wherein the new data is imported from a couple hundred excel files. I have routines to handle these imports for both databases.
>>
>>I have experimented with loading the SQL Server data into VFP cursors and displaying them in place of the VFP tables. That seems fairly straight forward. Updating those records however is another matter. I suppose I would have to figure out an UPDATE statement and then execute it against the database instead of simply typing in a browse window.
>>
>>Thoughts and advise will be appreciated.
>
>
>I'd go with option 1 with SQL pass thru.
>I've done it several times and it works well.
>Get yourself a good book on TSQL. You'll need to know that as well as you did the VFP I/O commands.

Good advice. There are just enough differences between them to drive you batty ;-)