Walter,

>> However I must note that Navision still is a very powerfull and
>> professional platform for writing administrative database applications.
>> The highly datadriven environment is something the VFP team and VFP
>> developers could learn al lot from.

We need to be clear where I am coming from, I am not critising Navision Attain as an end-user product, it is very good. I am being critical from the viewpoint of a developer that has to suffer Navision as a development tool on a daily basis. As I said in my earlier post if you are in charge of sourcing and implementing business systems for a company with limited technical resources then you cannot go wrong with Navision.

Again, it has a lot of "out of the box" functionality and is extremely reliable.

However, I think your last statement is totally wrong and I would say if you reverse it then you would be correct. It is obvious that you have never had to try and develop a major extension to Navision using C/Side and CAL, if you had then you would probably have picked up on some of the following DEVELOPER related issues :-

1] The IDE is totally unproductive (even useless), for example it doesn't even support the tab key in the editor for indenting code???

2] Character field lengths no greater than 250 characters even with the SQL option?

3] Character variables of no greater than 1024 characters which makes dealing with XML a nightmare (unless you create wrapper COM object in VFP).

4] Inconsistent terminology across properties.

5] Lack of multi-user development???

6] Lack of integrated source control????

In summary, if you have no development experience then Navision is great and you will be productive very quickly. If you are a developer in a modern language then you will become frustrated very quickly. Navision has everything to gain from the aquisition by Microsoft, the Fox team won't gain a fat lot from it unless they are about to downgrade the feature set of the language?