I am a veteran FoxPro developer who loved BFP but has decided that our large
commercial project that is extremely rich and complex in many ways and is
running like a charm and selling well in its vertical space. We have decided
that the product needs to be completely rewritten for the next generation of
our product, essentially providing similar functionality but on a much more
modern platform, capable of letting us provide not only for the SMB market
but also easily upscale for the mid market.

I am pretty convinced that Visual Studio is the way to go but I am not that
knowledgeable on its capabilities and have a wish list of items I am looking
for.

Ideally, much of this will either be provided by Visual Studio or by 3rd
party addon products.

Our application is multi windows, with complex multi tabbed forms with many
(sometimes hundreds of controls) on some of the more complex forms.

I am not sure how realistic some of these requirements are and obviously
will be willing to drop some of them if they are unrealistic.

Assuming money was no object, some of the things I would like to have
include:

- Complex Data dictionary controlling all aspects of a control
- Business rules library
- Resizeable forms
- Multi-lingual
- Easily transported to PDA / web application
- Database independant (SQL Server, Access etc, MYSQL etc).
- User enabled Form designer (so that end users can customise the layout of
the forms on the finished product) (not sure how that would work with our
complex tabbed interface forms but I am willing to relook at the entire user
interface experience
- Modularised deployment with easy deployment of small patches
- Real time web lookup of our registrations database for expiry /
reregistration
- Source code security
- Easily extensible to other packages (Accounting/CRM)
- Able to be developed in no time flat (rapid development environment)
- Self error checking or at least, easy to error check / test for new
releases
- Fast performance with large data sets

Gosh - probably a million more but you get the idea.

Basically, does such a platform exist to let me do all the above or do I
have to write the entire underlaying framework / infrastructure from
scratch?

I would appreciate honest answers, possibly leading to a colaboration with
someone knowledgebale in this area to help us get the project off the
ground.

Cheers
David Younger
The Service Manager