>I am interested to hear from forum members how important (or not) you think it is to be able to offer 64 bit applications vs. 32 bit currently (regardless of language used). Do you feel that being able to offer 64 bit exes is important or not really an issue in the field of general business applications?
I believe typical business applications rarely (if ever) would gain from 64 bit. When talking about data processing at the database backend, then yes, 64 bit is important when you have lots of data. Having a SQL Server backend (like MS SQL, MySQL or others as opposed to a VFP database and tables) gives you the possibility to create stored procedures that could do lots of data crunching on the 64 bit server. We have a MySQL database that comes close to 1 TB of data which really gains speed when running on 64 bit, but the client application doesn't have anything to do with that.
When you have to interact with other software that is 64 bit, then it could be an issue. One of our clients uses a 64bit Outlook client, and our VFP application cannot connect to it using the SFMAPI class, and I have the feeling that the 64bit is the culprit.
Christian Isberner
Software Consultant