>I've written a VOD program using VB & VFP. It works okay, however, I want it to be database driven not have to use work-arounds just to make it work. I perfer to program in VFP, however, VB ran the MPEG ActiveX player better: didn't work quite as well in VFP.
>I have a NT server with 10 to 20 workstations requesting videos. The VB program runs on a Windows 98 workstation whick interfaces with the user making the video request. We've had to use text files in order to get VB & VFP to communicate. Text files were used becuase we couldn't get VB to R/W to VFP database. Really want the whole system to be database driven.
>From what I've read on some of the threads ...
>I could write a COM object, load and run the COM object on a server, then VB (running on a workstation) could use the COM object to R/W to a VFP database(existing on a server).
>Is this, basicly, how it works? Can all my VB programs use the one COM Object at once (muti user)?
>I would appreciate any advice.
>Thank you.

It depends on what you want to do. If each VB app creates an instance of the VFP COM server via CreateObject for example, they each get a copy of the COM object. If you need to share information between VB apps realtime, rather than just make data services available, you can use a VFP app that creates VB COM servers and passes a reference to your VFP data object. That's what I've done when there was some limitation that prevented multiple copies of a data services object from being created, just created the one and passed a reference to other COM clients. I had to provide data services to an array of VB and C++ apps for a client where I sometimes got data from a third party COM server that only allowed one connection so I created a VFP app w/o an interface that in turn started the appropriate VB/C++ app and handled the data services.

Gary Foster
Pointsource Consulting Inc.