>Anyway, I am very used to having a metadata store and data-driving a lot of stuff in VFP and have been looking for places in .Net where that would be appropriate.

You mean, possible? ;)

>I realize this is kind of an amorphous question, but any thoughts you have ( or references to things you or others may have written on the subject ) about metadata in .Net would be most welcome.

Can you imagine what a deja vu am I having in this thread? I had the same one back in 1991 with a prominent Clipper guru back home, where I specifically asked whether it is possible in clipper to call a function whose name was retrieved from a table. The guy wiggled for about a week and eventually fired The Question (qv elsewhere in my posts for this weekend ;): "why would you need that at all?".

Of course, I didn't tell him why until he confessed that nope, that can't really be done in Clipper (I'm still confused on that, as IIRC Clipper had & but don't remember what its limitations were, and my knowledge doesn't go beyond '87 edition). At that time, I was replacing the generated menus with data driven dynamic menus. And then we got 2.0 with name expressions, textmerge etc... the whole story just got more interesting. A whole world completely beyond reach of static languages.

So, no matter how hard the Gang of Four may try to make their patterns language independent, they are succeeded as much as Fox is OS independent. Specially the factory pattern, which is implemented in 50 lines in Fox (from Define Class to EndDefine) with just about six fields in a factory.dbf, whereas the chapter in the GoF's book is much longer than that, because they think in C, or any other static language.