John,

>As for having to use ADO with Winforms: well, I got fairly good with ADO once-upon-a-time

Let's just clarify that you are not limited to ADO with WinForms -- the point is that there is no LOCAL data engine built in, so ADO would be a logical choice for all data manipulation, but not your only choice.

You can certainly call out to middle-tier / data-object types of COM objects or Web Services, which can be built with VFP. From there you may want to return an ADO recordset, or XML for data binding on the WinForms.

>In that case it would be nice to try using Winforms with ADO from VFP IMHO, even if just to show that you can!

WinForms can call other COM objects, and supposedly can be called themselves as COM objects -- but we will have to wait and see if VFP can host them -- we all know the problems with certain Active-X controls. Hopefully the VFP team will be able to let us host them, so there can be easier migration to the newer technologies.