>Thanks for the clarification ("Access/Assign were simply not designed to work at design time").
>
>As for "This could make for a pretty funky design environment if your assign method had runtime dependencies, so I think that decision was a wise one." well I've opened up a VB project that I haven't worked on since November. Can't for the life of me remember how it all works, but I am reassured (well not actually) to see comments like "not at design time" in custom controls, in otherwords I'm pretty sure that user-created VB controls are running "for real" when used in design mode (eg dropped onto a form in the form designer). The big catch is that you can't debug VB controls when you drop them onto fox forms!
>Dave

VFP controls are running too. You can set properties programmatically, and call applicable methods. But certain behaviors just don't apply at design time. For instance, would you want a control bound to a datasource that opens in the form.load to error because it gets refreshed after its init at design time? No. There are lots of things disabled at design time to make "design time" practical. Access/Assign is one of them.