Hi Nancy:

>>I think that Access is really being relegated to a position of being the >>design frontend for creating MSDE backends. Would you agree?

I don't know anything about Access, but I see it staying as the MS Office database, not a tool for doing corporate work.

>>But there's a lot of overhead, IMO.

The MISIL and runtime compliation will extract a performance penalty. However, in return you get no more DLL Hell, greatly simplified plumbing and arcane constructs of Win32 and COM, consistant programming model (all services are provided by a common OOP model), multi-platform, type safety, much easier deployment, etc.

>>but it's hard to pass up a tool that has everything you need in one place >>with no redistribution licensing costs

VFP is a great tool for independent contractors.

Regards,
Charlie