Hi James,

The performance issues you're encountering don't really have anything to do with VFE's object model. I'd suspect your concern is that you have a form with a fairly large number of controls on it and the form takes a while to instantiate. Is that the case?

Assuming that's the case, there are two factors that come into play here.

The first factor is the retrieval of properties from DBCX. I just added a new method to DBCX that allows us to retrieve all of the properties with a single hit on DBCX and to store them locally to the object that wants them. This change has cut form load time by a little bit over 25% based on my tests here and as much as 60% on forms with more controls. We're also considering adding options to allow you to store the properties that are needed at form instantiation time directly into the controls and to turn off the data dictionary access for those properties. The performance has gotten so much better that I doubt if this second option will be needed though.

The second factor is VFE's delayed binding. We're also working on allowing this feature to be turned off. This would of course require binding of objects directly to data instead of to other objects but, if you're not deploying the business objects via COM or DCOM then the delayed binding isn't as necessary or as advantageous. I've tinkered with this some already and basically this combined with the other changes makes form instantiation virtually instantaneous.

I wouldn't give up all of the other unique features that VFE provides just yet.