>>ASP is used heavily (I think exclusively) on most of MS's site. Would you say those are all simple web sites?
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>Right. Most of the Microsoft site is also fairly static! Other than some of hte signup pages and the knowledgebase a good deal of content in these ASP pages is mostly static.
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>Don't get me wrong. There are certainly many large ASP sites out there and obviously you can do a lot of things with ASP. I'm not claiming that WC is the only way or even the most efficient one - no way. But the issue at hand here is really using ASP VFP COM components as opposed to using Web Connection... and there I think the point can be easily made that WC is a much better choice both from efficiciency/performance and especially from time of development.
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>Also realize that most commerce sites that use ASP use only script code and not COM. This goes actually aginst MS's stated goal for ASP as a scripted COM client, but this is how the power has been abused over the years.
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>These sites also don't use a lot of the ASP niceties like Sessions etc that make ASP so relative easy to use when you first look at it, because this stuff doesn't scale well. Many of the large sites also use a few COM components, but they won't use VFP/VB components but C++/ATL components that are lightweight and get around some of the slow data parsing issues of ASP/ADO.
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>Finally, these applications run pools of servers in Web farms - You can argue that even the slowest application in the world can run a super high volume site as long as you throw enough hardware at it. Heck even a total single threaded application that could be scaled that way (with enough $$$).
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>I say these thigns because I've been involved in several apps that went from ASP -> WC and also several the other way around. In all cases the WC applications ran faster on fewer resources using the same data backends (SQL Server and Oracle in all cases) and roughly same business and display logic.
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>Speed and scalability isn't everything though. Most applications probably never hit the upper load limits for even a single machine - in my recent Web Connection tests I tested an app for 24 hours at over 1.5 million VFP backend hits... that's a lot of hits. Even assuming that ASP COM could do say half of that - you still have more traffic handling capabilities than 99% of sites will ever need.
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>So, the bottom line is that as with everything you as the developer needs to make a choice between tools that work best for you and whether you have faith that a product from a small company like mine will be able to address your needs as time goes on.
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> I think those that started out with me in 1995 won't have many regrets this far - the product has stayed up with innovation providing useful new features on a regular basis... you could say that even now WC is way ahead of the game. Many of the new features shown for VB7/Vstudio like Web Services and WebForms are already implemented in simialr forms in Web Connection and have been for over a year...
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>For me and a few thousand registered WC users the choice has been a clear one at least for VFP applications...

Wow. It sounds like I should take a look at it and forget learning ASP and VI. I will check out your site for a download and white papers.