Bonnie,

I'm sure nobody will jump on you for expressing an opinion based on experience ;-)

I prefer a rich-client interface and I'm betting that most users prefer that as well.

I agree- fat client offers users more. However, in 2004 the "experts" claim that most developers are doing web apps using dHTML, Flash or even vanilla HTML. Pre-Longhorn, web app deployment and maintenance advantages are pretty compelling and in many quarters there seems to be an attitude that if it isn't in a browser, it isn't "state of the art".

Local cursors? Well, I suppose every once in a while I might miss that capability, but I find it's not the necessity that most folks here insist they need.

Sure. I can see why dotNET is just fine for many list-based or lookup apps ... accounting and insurance spring to mind. If data munging wasn't a concern I'm sure I could use Java or dotNET for everything- it really isn't that hard, especially if ASP.NET is an option.

FWIW, we did implement a C# frontend even before 1.1 came out. It transfers HL7 into SQL and then it serves HTML, allowing users to select patients and/or collections of documents. These are packed into XML and submitted to a VFP server for processing.

We experimented with processing in dotNET as well; suffice to say we left it in VFP for a number of reasons, including the local cursor. Some (not you) imply that this is because VFP people have a SCAN...ENDSCAN security blanket and are afraid of anything different. Actually it is a lot simpler than that. We had lists of tens or even hundreds of thousands of items that needed to be ordered repeatedly by different expressions and messed with sequentially. With multiple documents, previous result-sets became lookups for subsequent documents. Local cursors were an order of magnitude quicker and much easier to manage than either uploading the multi-megabyte resultsets for a SP or using memory-resident ADO.NET. It just worked better- not the syntax, more the ability to span large indexed results intelligently between disc and memory without hogging resource.

When dotNET can mimic that particular feature, perhaps more VFP people will be willing to join the ranks of the enlightened ;-) I'll be sure to claim that I am an uber-prophet since I first raised this in 2002 ;-)