>Last week I wrote a .NET app that accessed SQL server and Mysql databases.
>It was about 15 lines of new code and lots of inheritance.
>I never trusted commercial frameworks, but jut recently I realized that I was using my own.

Having written one myself, and helping on two other in-house frameworks on one side, and the 4-5 commercial ones, I concur. They all have the same genesis - they were written as tools for the job at hand, then expanded to serve few other similar ones, then after a few iterations were deemed generalized enough to be sold to programmers in general.

And they do the job really well... but only if you define the job as „same kind of app, in the same manner as the framework authors do them“. As soon as your mindset is different to theirs, you run into trouble. Back in 1999, I had to actively fight the then VPM to get the job done. Okay, not just the VPM itself, but also the way the team on the app understood how to use VPM - mostly misunderstanding the notation and thus naming all the variables the way which was supposed to be reserved for framework's internals. The fight with VFE was easier, the Feltmans didn't have the DOS framework legacy dragging, and their mindset was closer to mine, but even then there were some points where we clashed and the framework was more a hindrance than help.

Nowadays, if I had to use one, I'd go for something lightweight - give me a good data layer, something based on cursoradapters; give me a rock solid bizobject, with cascaded saves and possibly auditing, and then something to replace the menu system, and then I can handle the rest myself. As for GUI, not much - perhaps a few tricks on each control, to handle highlight on focus, have a reference to .app object and the form's biz object in each, have an autofill combo and... well, the rest would be easy then. Don't need any complicated data dictionary, properties fetched from it at runtime, data-driven this or that - because each time I saw any of those, I disagreed on how they were written, I'd prefer to write my own :).