>It seems to me to be an issue of the cost of doing business.

I thought about that after I posted my previous post. Think about frameworks. What's Visual FoxPro Express cost? US$400 or so? Back in my consulting days, VFE (actually it was FPE 2.5 back then) paid for itself in one contract. (This is not an official Microsoft endorsement of VFE, it's just what I used when I was consulting. All disclaimers apply, blah, blah, blah.) There are tools that Microsoft might be able to include in the product, but not only would it put a few third party companies out of business, it also wouldn't be a good use of the Fox team's resources. Hey, do you want us to duplicate aftermarket products, or do you want use to put in cool features like IntelliSense? :-)

If your source code is so valuable that someone might decompile it, resulting in >US$400 loss to you, then spend the US$400 for ReFox. If your time is so valuable that a US$400 framework can save you even a mere day's worth of billable time, then buy the framework. I fail to see the issue here.

> That and an over-estimation of the worth of one's work. <g> I mean, give me a break here! With no offense meant for anyone I seriously doubt that anyone's code here is really worth the trouble, including mine.

I'll have to admit that even my commercial products wouldn't be worth decompiling. It's not like my VFP apps are the equivalent of Office or Windows. I mean, really, are you going to bother to decompile my ammo reloading software (and risk me suing you with all my muster), or just pony up the US$35?

>What really flummoxes me though is how worked up we get about programs and at the same time forgetting about how valuable the data really is. It's the data that is valuable, bot the code.

And there are easy, cheap fixes for this. Shoot, we even include a Crypto FFC in 7.0 that allows you to encrypt the data. If you can't figure out the FFC, just buy Cryptor or summat.