Craig,
>>No. You still must purchase VFP to develop any apps. Not so with .NET. You *can* get the compilers and framework for free. There are some freeware and shareware developer tools and IDEs available.<<
Actually, anybody can create standalone tables and manipulate them without a FP development license.
But it is a trickshot, not really a useful business proposition.
We need to be realistic about your suggestion as well. Creating dotNET apps using a text editor and a command line interface?! That's a cool idea in 2004! And are you advocating that neophytes can get MSDE installed and immediately functioning as easily as a FP table? Mom-and-pop outfits will have no difficulty at all, right?
I see that somebody has produced something called "VistaDB" for dotNET- simple distribution, small runtime and license-free distribution being the main attributes. Sounds somehow familiar... ;-)
"... They ne'er cared for us
yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses
crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to
support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act
established against the rich, and provide more
piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain
the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and
there's all the love they bear us."
-- Shakespeare: Coriolanus, Act 1, scene 1
