>There is an interesting case study at MSDN regarding an n-tier design where the authors indicate that they would have replaced VB middle-tier components with VC++ ATL components due to latency problems (the amount of time it takes to load and or communicate with other objects).
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>This got me to thinking....in a VFP shop, maybe what should be done is to design a virtual n-tier but physical 2-tier system: Create standalone VCX files or PRG's with class defs for data services and business rule enforcement and selectively link these file into projects and EXEs. So, you would pool the middle-tier into a ibrary, yet never compile them out as separate EXEs or DLLs.
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>Is anybody doing anything like that? Or is it really a bad idea? :-)

I don't think it's a really bad idea but wouldn't this be too restrictive? I think one of the advantages of n-tier is the separation of each layer to function w/o too much regards to changes in the other layers. If you don't separate the middle-tier in to separate EXEs or DLLs, you would "corner yourself" in to VFP-only solution. Just my simply opinion.