Hi Kevin,

I've been using VMP for many years now. The only other framework I have used in VFP was Codebook, and VMP is dead easy compared to that.

Start with the Tutorials as Thomas suggested, but also look at the videos that Drew Speedie created. They make things a lot easier to understand.

You can open the xxmain.prg and see what the version number is there. If you are running from a VMP installation (as opposed to just copying the VMP files) you should have a VMP menu added on to the VFP menu and the first option on that menu will say what the VMP Build is.

As for the PRGs, you hardly ever need to refer to them, they are used by the framework code. Generally they are functions which I guess could have been put in a VCX, but then you have the added overhead of having to instantiate a class to use the function, but that's really just a matter of personal taste. Drew's naming convention is that anything starting with "x" is a framework piece of code and should not be touched. The numeral (as in "x1") denotes the version of VMP that the code was introduced in. So calling x8Setcls() with the name of the class does a bit more than just SET CLASSLIB TO yourclass, I can't remember off the top of my head, but Drew was pretty good at commenting his code, so the header comments will explain what it does. Oh, xxiudlog is the Audit Trail (I = Insert, U = Update, D = Delete).

With reference to the zReadMe and the Code References tool, the zReadme is where Drew's comments are most abundant and helpful as they explain exactly how to implement the class in question. VMP has its own Code References dialog called XXDTSearch (DT stands for Developer Tool). I believe this was developed before the Code references was introduced and it may give you a bit more flexibility than VFP's native tool (for example you can search just through your code and ignore the VMP code).

I'm not sure what you mean by "central coding style", but I find Drew's style pretty consistent.

Like all new things, it will take some work to understand it, but once you get the basics down, VMP is pretty easy to use.

Any questions I'll try my best to help, but you'll probably get quicker help at http://vmpdiscussion.visionpace.com/

Good luck!


>Anyone using Visual MaxFrame?
>
>I just inherited a legacy app based on VMP. I don't know what version of VMP this is.
>
>From what I can see, VMP isn't all that great. There are alot of PRG's (Why not in
>class libraries??) and there seems to be alot of duplicated code.
>
>Add to that the file names are rediculous, ie, 'x1fml.prg', 'x8setcls.prg', 'xxiudlog.prg',
>and so on. These names are entirely meaningless and don't help me learn the framework at
>all.
>
>There seems to be no central coding style.
>
>And there are really strange functions that don't seem necessary. I'm scratching my head
>wondering, "Why would someone do this???"
>
>And, in all of the visual classes there is method for comments called 'zreadme'. Instead of
>actually commenting out all the text in here, it's all wrapped in #IF/#ENDIF statements. Now
>I'm sure someone thought this was cool to do, but it make searching with the Code References
>dialog that mich more difficult because since it's not actually commented out, the 'Ignore
>Comments' option doesn't apply, causing the search results to be overblown with references
>to items that are not real code lines.
>
>I can see I have a lot of work ahead of me.