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Can you give me a case where, under these circumstances, it would be more cost effective to use a completely use a .NET solution rather than including Fox in it?
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Sure...to somebody who knows .NET, and does not know Fox, it would be more cost effective to do the project in .NET. For somebody who knows both, it depends on a lot of factors. To somebody who only knows Fox, it would definitely be more cost effective in Fox.

Without more specifics, it would be difficult to quantify this. Suffice it to say that if you have data, and you need query capabilitites, as well as reporting capabilitites, it could absolutely be done in .NET. It could also be done in Fox, and a variety of other tools. The bottom line, Fox does not have a hands-down presumptive advantage over other tools. Somehow, others, using other tools, manage to get this sort of work done.

The one thing to keep in mind, and please do not take this personally because it is not meant that way, expertise in a tool IS NOT a technical advantage of the tool. It may be an advantage for the project - but not the tool. Expertise with a tool, that gives some economies of time, does not in the long run, make it the best choice. It may be the best choice, but being able to get tho job done in a quicker fashion does not go to that metric. For example, if I know a job would take 100 hours in Fox, I could see people accepting 125 or perhaps 150 hours to do it in something else - it there was an advantage in absorbing some additional up-front cost.


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To my way of thinking, with Fox, I can create one query to properly generate these reports against a data set from SQL Server. If, however, I go with a completely .NET solution, I have to create 30 different stored procedures (unless, of course, I set the compatibility level at 6.5 for the database, which is a bad idea.) and have 60 trips back and forth over the line, not to mention the maintenance of them. Using Fox, I can reduce this to two trips and have one query to support.
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The problem here is that you are looking at trips to the server has being a bad thing. As it stands now, you get data in large chunks - and you munge it in Fox. It may, and probably does work fine. However, what if you need to make that data available to other clients. As it stands now, Fox is the only platform (assuming you can call it that) you have. That may be alright. Then again, you may have limited yourself.

IMO, just because something can be done in Fox - that is the last reason to choose the tool. If tools are based on this metric primarily, then one will almost certainly eschew new tools and techniques.