Hi, Jerry.

>But, there is no guarantee that free services will remain free once a user has moved their data over to Passport servers and begun utilizing the remote executables. The 'freeness' of a service relates to the service provider's bottom line, not the clients. Also, once data is on Passport, if the client changes their mind are there export 'services' to extract their data from the propriatary formats.

Of course, I wouldn't count on Passport for user identification this days, as yet they have too many glitches, but time will tell if the needed reliability for calling a "mision critical" web service like this is reached.

But Web Services are far beyond Passport and even MS. I like the possibility of just calling a Service to calculate a shipping cost, a local tax, retrieve some region weather or simply pull stock quotes or news from somewhere in a consistent fashion. And of course some of this examples applies to Web Apps, but other could be used in Desktop ones to make them richer (and more dynamic than Activex, being able to lookup and organize remotely stored data).

That told, Web Services and .Net are still a promess, but they are increasingly being used, and the problems would slowly be eliminated, and the technology would evolve and mature to a point in which everyone of us could use it.


>Also, I've wondered how many clients can use the same remote executable before bandwidth limitations slow their access down and make performance unacceptable. Then there are the problems assoicated with down times. Clients are at the mercy and expertise of the Passport server techies, and predicting downtimes (and revenue losses or expense costs) becomes problematic. In other words, mamagement of the companies operations have, to some extent, been moved out of their control.

About the remote executables, the whole thing is designed to scale to million simultaneous hits, and that's why the model is absolutely disconnected and lightway. Of course you still have to have the right hardware to do the task, but now it can really be done.

Indeed, Passport, even being so slow and having a lot of problems, is scaling to millions of users (think hotmail + msn + almost-anything-ms).

Management is another thing. I believe that all of this would evolve in new kind of relationships between companies. Just read about products like BizTalk Server and you will see that there is mucho more than technology to be integrated.

As for the position of VFP in all that, VFP 7 can produce (and consume) Web Services very easily, so being on .Net or not is not so important.

We still have a very powerful applicaction that can be integrated with other COM and .Net (via interop) tools, and that can work with Web Services. We even have wonderful third party products like Web Connection to produce great Internet Applications. And, as Craig said, out tool is in version 7 (well, the 4th one, really), while VS.Net 1.0 release date is yet to be announced.

Just my humble 2 cents opinion. :)