>The biggest problem in VFP with controls and protected or hidden properties is, that they are still visible in Intellisense and you don't have any indication that they cannot be accessed, until you run into a runtime error. That defeats the purpose of hiding them in the first place and it increases the chance to get an error.
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>I believe this is one of the main reasons it never got much used in VFP code.

Ouch. I got bitten by that one several times. Since I don't use them (for reasons other mentioned already), I forget them and then stub my toes on them when using components from others who do. Specially when recursing through controls (various decorators, for example), I can't even skip them by checking their class or classlib, because even these properties are hidden. Try/catch is the only workaround which works for all of them.