I did something very stupid in an initial design -- inherited the textboxes in my grids (hand painted) directly from the base textbox class.

Naturally I ran into some global changes I wanted to make and looked with horror at the prospect of dropping and adding each textbox in each grid. After looking at programatic changes I came up with a simple solution. I opened each vcx, and did a global search and replace of class and classloc wherever class equaled textbox.

(Yes I made an extra backup before doing this.)

I recompiled my project, with the flag set to recompile all, and so far everything works fine.

I still worry,though. Just how dangerous is it to mess directly with the vcx in this manner? I probably had no choice in this matter. When you do something as bonehead as that, I doubt there are any "safe" solutions. But being able to do this kind of global redefine is actually quite handy. How ready should I be to use this type of solution in the future?