I fully understand your view. I use VFP COM's when I need to crunch data. As far the install and register dll's I feel your pain. There are several avenue's to help eliminate this problem (not to mention having to stop IIS or MTS to shutdown the in-process com's during the test-debug cycle).

The solution I used was to develop a VFP COM wrapper. The basic approach here is ASP instanciates a single VFP COM. The ASP page then sets several properties in the COM including the VFP PRG or Class to execute, location of the source, etc. The ASP page then calls a method in the class (called execute). The execute procedure basicly checks the compiled PRG/Class files date/time (if it exists) against the source file. If required the source file is compiled. The compiled file is then executed. Now you have one DLL on the server that can execute any number of VFP programs.

In reality there are actually two indentical wrappers. One is compiled multi-threaded the other as single-threaded. During debug the ASP page calls the single-threaded COM. This allows you to make code changes to your prg/class and re-test without having to stop the DLL from MTS. The multi-threaded DLL will keep the prg/class executable loaded and prevent a dynamic re-compile.

To assist with debugging the class contains an error handler that formats all error messages into HTML to be returned to the client browser.

You can now also do some neat things like creating a code preprocessor to run before the compile. The preprocessor could handle new commands for embeding HTML code blocks, etc. directly in your source.

>>>If I install VFP7 on the web server, will the OLEDB client work using VFP6 com objects?
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>>If your using VFP6 COM's (I assume called from ASP) then why are you trying to use odbc? Why not access the data directly with the USE command? It will tons faster. - Oh, and no VFP's SQLConnect does not support OLE-DB directly. You could use ADO and OLE-DB from a VFP COM however.
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>I thought this was the accepted way to use disconnected data. I am trying to grab a recordset from a VFP free table to display in a combobox in asp. I can and have used COM to handle data calls BUT I want to get away from having to install or register dll's on the web server.