>If you follow this architecture (which is the way most modern development is going) the guts of your application is in your business layer(s). The UI never touches the data directly. (So DE and Forms are a none issue for any serious development project. I no longer touch the DE.)

VB DE still uses ODBC/OLE DB. You are using cursors here and therefore, it is not directly connected to DB. Unlike VFP, using its traditional DML, it's purely single tier. Now, exclude middle-tier, and VB is purely 2-tier development regardless of the database. It might be subjective, but combine VB/ACCESS DB or VB/VFPDBC, it is a two-tier architecture because of SPs/Triggers. That scenario, the methodology is 2-tier because you have 2 layers.