Charlie-

>>>I think that Access is really being relegated to a position of being the >>design frontend for creating MSDE backends. Would you agree?
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>I don't know anything about Access, but I see it staying as the MS Office database, not a tool for doing corporate work.

That's the sense I get, and one I missed in my comment. In terms of *more than* the Office DB, it does seem to be useful for managing MSDE.

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

Oh, yeah. Don't misunderstand me. I'm a big fan of DotNet.

>>>but it's hard to pass up a tool that has everything you need in one place >>with no redistribution licensing costs
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>VFP is a great tool for independent contractors.

Yes, indeed.