>George,
>
>>>snip<<
>
>>Well, we can hope.< g > Seriously, I'd really like to hear what Ed R. has to say about this. He's the guy that can give better insights to the ramifications of something like this.
>
>Ed's too darn smart. *G*

I'll second that motion!< g > C'mon Ed, jump in.

>>In some ways, component design utilizing dynamic linking makes things much easier to deal with. Back in FPW all my applications were APP files that were started by a single EXE. The EXE contained all the system level services (opening tables, printing reports, handling the command bar, handling searches, etc.) required by the apps. The apps accessed the services by utilizing dynamic linking. These (the services) were included in the Project Manager for the apps, but marked as excluded. If a change was required in one of these services, all I had to do was re-compile the main EXE and turn over one file to impact all the applications.
>>
>>N-Tier offers a whole new realm of possibilities in this area, since it can potentially allow us to interact with other applications, which may or may not be based on the VFP development platform.
>
>Right. Alan Schwartz, formerly of FoxFire! fame had a nifty little trick he used to link multiple .APP files. He's call a dummy procedure the first one which would return to the calling EXE, ehich would then call the 2nd through the nth. By so doing FoxPro registered all the procedures and functions and knew where to find them. It was the "then" version of today's DLL essentially.
>
Forget to turn something off< g >. You're right, that is a pretty slick trick. What I did was far more elementary, I simply declared the procedure file in the EXE and setup the main portion of the user interface. When the app was called the procedure file was already in place. Interesting to note, however, that the conventional wisdom (at least from my reading) at the time said that you'd take too steep a performance hit in utilizing dynamic linking. However, I never found that to be the case despite the fact that every screen element's When clause referenced a function back in the main executable's procedure file.