Hi Evan ----

>Can you give an overview of the tools types of projects?
>

Sure....one of them involves a PowerBuilder, CICS, and OS/390 DB2 with a buncha other facilitative tools involved (don't have the names in front of me). Another is XML and Javascript on top of Oracle and C in the middle. Another involves Powerbuilder and AS/400 DB2 via a Sybase gateway.

>>Advanced architectural n-tier theory does not apply to 70-80% of business needs and, when it does, as I already said, using either VB or VFP as a major player is foolhardy.
>
>Yikes. Could you explain your reasons for thinking it is foolhardy?

Several reasons....For applications involving a fairly complex UI, VB and VFP are pigs. VB middle-tier objects suffer from initialization latency problems at times. VB and VFP require some variant of the ODBC standard to efficiently work with server data. And VB and VFP have been known to GPF fairly frequently with large server datasets and this is not good in a distributed environment. There are other reasons.....