Your boss is getting annoyed with you and that's never a good thing. Unfortunately your hope of a fresh analysis and redesign is, for now, off the cards. Going by his response to the designers work it sounds like your first port of call should be to port the whole app to .net. I know this sounds awful but there should be some quick(?) wins for the users; nice shiney new UI for a start, not to be underestimated. Also, you will get a good understanding of how the old system works which should hint at how the business works and you'll learn a great deal. Then, off your own bat and possibly in your own time, identify a section of the app/business that is rife for a redesign and just do it. It looks like you have pretty much free-reign as long as you start producing something. If feedback is good for that piece, better still if users start suggestion slight alterations that can be done quickly and easily then the bossman should recognise that the redesigned area is better and can bring efficiencies to his business. From the sounds of it the only way you can convince your boss the merits of well designed software is to just do it. You need to pick a pice that you can redesign quickly, basically without him noticing, and let the result win him round. Greg

Is it possible they have simply read or heard that nulls are bad and so eradicate them with defaut values without understanding the database principles behind the statement? (I regularly use nulls in database design, normalising every last one away is rarely a worth it). Greg