Hi John,

We did a 2.6 to VFP conversion about eight months ago. The client was not interested in converting the app except for two reasons: 1) The app was a vertical market product and in order to sell it to a large customer it had to be a 32-bit app. 2) The 2.6 app included picture files that were stored in a fractal image format (fif) and the potential customer wanted to use jpg. So their motivation to upgrade had nothing to do with taking advantage of OOP, n-tier design, etc. In fact they wanted to still use the 2.X dbf file format.

That being said, here are the problems we ran into doing a straight as possible conversion and the solutions:
1) There were many forms that used a BROWSE window coordinated with a READ. All of these forms did not work and had to be redesigned to form classes using a grid.
2) Of course any use of 16 bit DLL's or FLL's had to be changed to a 32 bit DLL.
The good news was that most calls to external libraries were accessed through a wrapper prg. The bad news was that some of the companies that wrote the FLL's did not create a 32 bit product so a new product had to be used.
3) Converting 2.6 SCX's to VFP SCX's created alot of problems. In some cases the form would run extremely slow. In other cases they simply did not run. I suggest keeping the SCX's in 2.6 format and have the VFP project access the GEN\ directory for the SPR's. That way, if you need to make a minor change to a screen you can do it in 2.6 and generate the source.
4) The 2.6 app make extensive use of invisible buttons and invisible buttons did not always behave properly in VFP.

The problem with your situation is that since there was no reason in 2.6 to seperate an application into physical tiers, most 2.6 apps are not seperated into logical tiers that you can easily work with. IOW the business logic is spread all over the place in the UI and data access routines.

Here's one more thing to consider. If you plan on moving the data into a VFP database so that you can take advantage of row buffering, table buffering, views, you will quickly find that most of the data access and manipulation code goes in the can.

Regards,

George