>Hi Hank,
>
>Thanks for this great post:)
>
>Mapping the generic discussions held in "third-generation" languages around MVC patterns to VFP and its own set of idiosyncrasies is certainly difficult. Of course MVC pattern are not that required in VFP because of its specific data handlind facilities.
>
>Your words made the point very clear!
>
>Of course MVC is wider in scope. But as far as I am concerned, I never felt forced into devising some sort of MVC pattern within the FOX. It could certainly help when mapping highly complex data structures - i-e non relational ones - to highly complex visual UIs. But we rarely do within VFP.
>
>Daniel

Hi Daniel,

thanks. For a while (mid-oughts) I was exploring all the various data Frameworks available for .Net, even got Julia Lerman's Entity Framework book. She's a genius. And if it takes a genius 1,000 pages (or whatever it is) to articulate a framework, that's proof to me that this is not the framework I am looking for.

The "wider in scope" of MVC is what I referenced in the mention of using metadata as a separate concern. We make more use of metadata than any framework I've seen: in VFP we took the framework that made the most use of metadata, and then approximately doubled the metadata attributes to handle real-world programming issues that affected workflow in development. In programming, "anything can be done with anything," what differs is the amount of effort required in creating and using and maintaining. Separation of concerns eases the amount of effort in all 3 areas of effort, and also enhances portability If I were using .Net, I would use a lightweight ORM for that reason.

Hank