Hi Since you are already using VC++, I can only assume that "faster development platform" means faster rate of development, not runtime speed. Your requirements are all met if you consider Python, and particularly item 1; you should not, however, simply take advice for your business from someone in an online forum: rather spend 2 or 3 days going through the Python tutorial and then make up your mind. It should give you a reasonable idea of what your saving in development time will be. I should be very surprised if, after having done this, you remain unsure whether there would be any development time-saving. You can use wxPython to use wxWindows through Python (though there are many other windowing toolkits with Python wrappers; choose whatever meets your needs). The "Python for Windows" extensions expose the Win32 API. XML stuff is built-in, along with networking stuff, net protocol stuff, and so on. If you've never installed Python before, you should probably get the Activestate python distribution as it comes with a whole bunch of additional stuff. The comp.lang.python newsgroup is active and friendly to newcomers. Typically you might find that after the app is written in Python, there might be a (runtime) speed bottleneck, the proverbial 1% of the code that takes 99% of the run time. Normally, just that bit is then recoded in a statically compiled language such as C or C++ (you could reuse existing code), for which numerous tools and tutorials are available. This philosophy makes void the silly "that language is slow/fast" argument; rather use the best tool for the job. Note that if your problem domain is going to be IO-bound, there will be negligible different between Python and C (and most anything else). Keep well Caleb