>Thanks a lot! One of our customers actually e-mailed Phil and told him to ask me something like stop the blood letting and get back to work on the framework too.

Mike,

There is a small bit of blood on the floor, but the outcome has been most advantageous to the thread. There has been alot of supporting information about the though process that goes into selecting whether to build your own or buy one regarding frameworks.

I only wish that Jess and the guys sending him email would come in this thread and start posting their reasoning for building their own.

Just to give the other side some time; the reason that the two clients asked me to build a framework for them was the same in both instances. The application was very specialized and had a very high number of special requirements that any commercial framework would have taken alot of effort to get into compliance. This caused them to believe that the build your own was the easier route to follow. However, they didn't really build their own, they found someone with framework design experience to build it for them.