>Our company runs different specialized applications for different tasks. We would like, however, for different applications (some VB and some VFP) to utilize the same yet-to-be designed PO/Invoicing application. Since all existing applications needs to create and work with PO/Invoices, I want to create one application that can be accessed/shared by both existing VB and VFP-based applications.
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>Would creating an out-of-process ActiveX EXE enable this type of configuration? What I'm trying to avoid is having to create same PO/Invoice data entry screens for each specialized application (VB & VFP version) which would require double maintenance.
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>Any suggestion will be greatly appreciated. TIA.

Hi John,

You might be mixing different things here.

ActiveX is indeed a COM object and can be added to any project type. But when a control(s) is compiled as part of an .EXE file, however, it cannot be shared with other applications.

It should be compiled into an .OCX file in order to be shared by different applications on the same PC. I would not call ActiveX OCX then an out-of-process COM since its instance runs in your VB or VFP application.
Such specialized OCX might be what you are looking for your entry screens. But it should be copied and registered on every client PC.

Since it should be a networking application, you might also want to look at Web-based solution with browser client on the workstations and multithreaded DLL running on the server. In this case the DLL for data processing may be created in VFP.

Never tried that, but I think that your data entry part may be run in a WebBrowser control placed on VB or VFP form in existing applications.