Hi John,

Typically its very difficult to fit an existing application into a commercial framework. Because frameworks are a collection of classes designed to work together it's often very difficult to retrofit an existing application into them. We have a lot of customers in this boat and they usually decided to take the data model and start over and then maybe paste business logic into the appropriate methods in the framework.

You can also hack the .VCX and .SCX files to change the classes that forms and their member objects are based on. We've had customers accomplish this with varying degrees of success.

If you don't want to rewrite it and your application is largely form based and uses the built in data environments, I'd recommend Visual MaxFrame in this case. If you study the framework and look at what classes forms and various controls should be based on, it probably won't be to difficult to hack the app into a MaxFrame application. ProMatrix is also a candidate here, but I think getting all of their dd features, particularly the RI stuff retrofitted into an existing application would be pretty tough. Codemine and Visual Extend may also be possibilities, but I don't know as much about them.

Codebook, VFE and the Mere Mortals framework probably wouldn't be good fits unless you wanted to rewrite the application. Retrofitting business objects and data environment classes into existing forms would take considerably more work.