Jim,

>Nobody here is arguing with you about where the future is, however we are arguing about the degree of doomsayer you show towards VFP. I don't see any reason to abandon VFP right now. Even though I am learning .NET, I am also using VFP to do what it does best. There still is no challenger to VFP's string handling speed, and VFP is the only tool in the MS box that has its own local data engine for metadata that doesn't need ODBC or OLEDB top get at the metadata.

.NET and SQL Server can do this without OleDb or ODBC. In fact, .NET can work with pure XML files as a datasource for DataSets not requiring any 'database' engine per se, but using data from whatever source.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by 'local data engine for metadata' but I assume you mean local datasource without a full SQL backend database?