>Given the major hype re: ADO I'm curious about it. How do you use FoxPro to create middle-tier objects that can be used by various front ends? That can access various back ends? How do you separate business objects from data objects? (In all my spare time ...)

IMHO, ADO is not needed - it is, if you use VB, ASP, etc., but not from Visual FoxPro as you have all you need with its powerful database engine. What is your backend (SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase)? Visual FoxPro will do the job very well and you won't have to use ADO at all. ADO might be a buzz word for other environments, but certainly not from Visual FoxPro.