>I am looking for a GIS ActiveX control that I can use to spacially enable my application. I have zero experience in this arena, so I would appreciate any recommendations, helpful hints or war stories.

Robert:

I'm also using Map Objects after using Sylvan Maps.

Sylvan Maps http:\\www.sylvanmaps.com is very nice if it does exactly what you want out of the box. It's very easy to use (just point it at the data and stand back). I was able to implement a mapping add-on to our software in a day or so and it worked fine in VFP. BUT, if you want to change something, forget it (at least in 2.xx, they now have a version 3 but i don't know anything about it). They are also a little slow on the development side (i had the same version for 2 years)

Map Objects is a very nice supper extensable product but it's a little tricky to use and a bit flakey under VFP. What i did was create a Visual Basic Active-X control with the ESRI Map objects Active-X control on it. With a little interface code to expose the properties & methods from the map objects control. This works really well for map objects as well as those active-x controls you want to use in VFP but they just don't work quite right.

hth

scott