>>Now this is where we strongly differ. You can't do anything more complicated, because you need to know twenty parameters (by position or name). In ADO.net, don't you ever pass a recordset as a parameter? In old ADO you couldn't breathe without doing that. Recordset is an object.
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>Once of the complaints people have had about VFP is that its classes don't all inherit from a single class that you can subclass. Everything in .Net inherits from Object.

I think VFP objects inherit from Control or something like that - but the other part is the problem, we can't subclass from there. The search for the lightest base class started very early - Line was the one, IIRC.

>>I meant "object" as an instance. Is it Microsoft redefining common words again? Last time I learned the meaning of "object" in OOP, it was "an instance of a class". Now it's a top level class... maybe the same as the abstract class in the root of the class set? Didn't mean that - I thought nobody mentions it in that sense except when explaining the whole inheritance in a lecture.
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>See above.. just pass the form controls as type "object".

Good. I would expect that to be the case.

>>See code above. How do you implement a decorator pattern?
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>See http://www.dofactory.com/Patterns/PatternDecorator.aspx

Yes, that would work - as long as there are equivalents to pemstatus(), getpem() and such, it could be made to work on a generic object.