>I don't today see a way around it (unless you could create some sort of business code generation system which updated the code for the client side), but it starts to give me that feeling of out-of-controlnes which I so try to avoid.

What we need is a way to describe business rules in an XML format that can be read and interpreted by any platform (VFP, VB, JScript, VBScript). This way, we could write business rules in one place and any code dealing with the data could read the business rules document, and validate data against it however it sees fit.

>It's a very interesting and though provoking issue. Are you aware of any people who have written on patterns to apply when doing such coding?

There was an effort lead by IBM to develop BRML, and they released a 1.0 of a product called CommonRules that was a set of Java libraries to make use of it. However, I can't find any recent documents on the current state of BRML, and I'm not sure if it has transformed into something else or what.