>>Our needs can only be satisfied if we are going to buy not one but 3 above, and so if we are going to do that, we will come up with a framework entitled "VMCMVFECDMORTALS."
>
>I actually know of a developer who has combined Visual FoxExpress, Visual MaxFrame, Visual ProMatrix, Codebook for Mere Mortals and a few things from Codemine into his own custom framework. He's also incorporated Query Maker and several activex controls. In all, he spent about 95K on consulting and products to get everything working together, but his application is awesome and he still estimates that he cut the cost of his development in at least half by taking the best of each of the frameworks.

Mike,

To answer your two postings, let me clarify my standpoint about framework. First I am absolutely not against third party frameworks, in fact, we did search for one that might help our development easier and productive in the sense. But unfortunately, it did not met our requirements to a certain point. And so we decided to build our own that perfectly fits to our likes as a team of developers.

Our in-house framework is not sophisticated as compare to any other popular 3rd party's like yours to a certain point, but the bottomline here is meeting the needs of the time. Good thing you have mentioned that guy came up with a custom framework that is designed out of many frameworks. And I salute him for that because he will not certainly be dependent on another company aside from MS on the long term basis. Unlike some who are becoming dependent to two or three instead of MS alone that is if they decided to be a plain user of the framework only, and not studying the architecture behind. How many guys out there who are becoming problematic on whom to ask if the error is of the Framework or on the VFP language?

Frameworks are good but if a developer wanted to benefit even on the long term basis, he/she should study the architecture behind, otherwise, it is another unstoppable bucks of money will come out of his/her pocket for the next versions.