>>>The trouble is that this attempts to create the damn bizobject at design time too. As the bizobject's instantiation may rely on pieces of the framework which aren't there at design time, I only need a way to prevent this. So, my question is what is the trick to have an expression in the property which will return an object at runtime, and yet do nothing when I Modify Class mycontainer?
>>
>>Instead of direct newobject do something like
>>
>>=myFunc()
>>
>>or try
>>
>>=IIF(_VFP.StartMode = 0,null, newobject())
>
>The first works; the second would make testing near impossible without building an exe and running it outside VFP.

Right, there should be a different way of figuring out design time vs. run-time - I forgot the exact way.