>Now that I have begun to skim the suface on Private Data Sessions, I have a basic questions -
>
>Why use them at all??

Ken-
In addition to what all of the others have said, private DS promotes encapsulation in your forms, and forces you to think about parameter passing instead of inter-form dependencies. After you start using private datasessions, you will start to notice that your forms become more transportable- they can be called from anywhere, any number of times, and do not depend on an environment already set up in a calling form. Your forms fend for themselves, because their data environment and record pointers are taken care of inside the form.

Peter-
If you ever do write your own framework, you should think long and hard before using forms that depend on the default datasession. IMHO, this scheme shows tendencies to do things the FPW 2x way, and not the OO way. Handling things like record pointer coordination should be handled via a forms manager or some other object set up for inter-form communication.