Perry,

>>these types of apps must exist in other languages. Have you investigated what alternative methods are available in a VB/VB.net, etc. app to show 40,000 items? It just doesn't seem to me that this is a big issue for people on the other side of the fence. Otherwise we would see all kinds of developers beating on the door to get let into the VFP room. And this just hasn't happened.

Pliny the elder knew the answer to that a few centuries ago:

"Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvelous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time?
How many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible until they have been actually effected?"

While it is fashionable for dotNET fans to say VFP people have their heads in the sand, actually it is more fairly the other way around. Few VB or C# developers have any clue about local datasets that span to disk, or inline parsing, or any of the other features that VFP people have taken for granted since 1998. If their tool does not have it, it can't be any good.

However, as Pliny observes, once dotNET gets spanning local datasets, the gurus will promote it to the skies as a brilliant innovation that was previously impossible; another of the fabulous innovations in dotNET.