>>1. Do the forms have pageframes?
>No
>
>>2. How are tables opened - at the form level or upon application startup?
>At the form - but the app is effectively just one top-level form anyway
>
>>3. How large are the tables?
>Very small - 100,200 records. Except for the address books which could be very large as they are created via ODBC mapping to external data sources.
>>4. LAN speed - 10T or 100T?
>The tables are held locally - at least the ones opened when the top-level form instantiates are.

Hi, Anna.

I followed the thread and I saw something that give me an orientation about what you're doing.

As I see it, much of your app is oriented to Office Automation and is not much database intensive. It looks as a desktop application also, not very complicated with multiuser ccontrols.

That seems an ideal case for VB, indeed. Mainly, you can use LOTS of controls to give it the type of interface you want, and to control of Office tools is obviuosly the best choice (just look at the documentation, the samples, the magazines, etc).

Personally, I find VB very tedious and I don't like the language (even having used Basic from CP/M to Visual Studio).

I didn't do much with Delphi but I really liked what I saw. It is an elegant Pascal, and is very Object Oriented. Alas! I don't think I'd bet any of my time on it. If we suffer lack of visibility on VFP, I'm afraid Delphi is worst.

I know there is a lot of people using it, but I really think they are shrinking anyway. Borland (or Inprise, or Borland again) is having troubles since many years ago, and you can easily get stucked.

The next VB is a lot better, anyway, and I believe in many cases would be easier to learn for a VFP programer that a VB6 one. so if you know VFP and VB today, you will have a great tool at hand when VB.Net arrives.

A last ranting about Delphi. Many people that worked with it and saw C# are please and very excited because it's quite simmilar and powerful and I think it can be a viable alternative. Indeed this is not strange, as C# designer is the same who did Turbo Pascal and Delphi.

This is just a bunch of thoughts and ideas, more than any advice. I think your best chance is to think about all the feedback and take a look at both tools.

Best luck!