>I have decided I have to buy an application Framework to keep up with all you guys.
>
>I only have about 6 months VFP (But nearly 20 years xbase)
>

A bit late into the fray but I don't always get a chance to read the thread as much as I'd like.

Like you, I had several years FP DOS experience but OOP was a completely new field to me. I decided that frameworks would help me get up and running quickly because they do so much of the work for you. I now see that as a huge error on my part.

Whilst it is true that you can create robust and reasonably functional apps in a fraction of the usual time, the problems arise when anything goes wrong and you haven't a clue how to fix it because a) you didn't write the code and b) you don't understand the error messages. c) you don't understand the language being used by the people doing their best to support you. This results in deep floundering!

After wasting the best part of a year trying to make progress that way - and very nearly persuading myself that this new paradigm was obviously not for me and I should find myself a new career - I eventually decided to go back to basics and just use the native vfp environment until I had a much better grasp of the OOP principles. THEN I started to make rapid progress and the results have since been very encouraging.

I'm still struggling in some areas. Not so much with the concepts as with the consequences of those concepts when applied to an application. But now I feel I'm just about at the level where I can go back to the framework and make much better use of it.

However, the only framework I tried was ProMatrix. It may be that had I tried one of the others, my experience might have been positive that much earlier.

I certainly have no complaints about VPM itself. Its just that 'shielding' myself from the OOP learning curve by using a framework to do so much of the work made me feel like a fish out of water. I am keen to stay with VPM particularly as they now offer full 'enterprise' scalability and full multilanguage functionality. It also seems to me to offer amazing functionality and pretty good support.

Regards

Harry