>>>>What about those that say that OO is a tool just as everything else. It is to be used, but it is not an End-all, Be-all.
>>>
>>>This is inherently true. OOP is methodology. Granted it is a very popular and rock solid one.
>>
>>Agreed. Also, the mere fact that the product (VFP in this case) uses built-in OO-methodology forces developers to adopt it as default, just to avoid painful collisions.
>
>I've been following this thread because I'm doing more and more VFP but still supporting older FPD/FPW2.x systems and old habits are hard to break. I still use push/pop functions to open/close DBC tables in the init/unload events as nec. I have no experience letting a form's dataenvironment open an close tables for me but I would like to use the tools that are available. Does the DE have any pitfalls?

Ed brought up the most serious pitfall. On the upside, files opened by the dataenivronment are opened quicker than by the "use" statement. It seems to be a more fundamental operation.

I have VFP projects that use both the DE way and also the older way of opening tables (at application startup). DE pays off with a more stable and self contained form. Opening tables at the start is beginning to feel like using global variables. :-|