>When you save a form as a class you have created a form class, the contents are instances of the class that you created them from. When you instantiate a from the form class the contents are NOT subclasses of teh controls that are in the form class. They are simply instances of whatever class they derived from.
>
>You are beginning to see why it is not a good idea to save forms as classes. If you want a fomr class then decide what needs to be in it and create the class heirarchy for those things, finally create a form class and put instances of the control classes you created in th form class.

I think I can do that by building a form with all of it's controls to build up a working prototype, then save each of the form's controls separately as a class, right? Then rebuild the form from the control subclasses I've created.

Seems like it would have been nice if VFP did this for you when you save a form as a class: automatically save each of the controls as a subclass of the class from which they were created and then instantiate from these subclasses when the form is instantiated.