>>It's exactly what you said about the form wizard. I'm in the situation of modifying lots of code and the results are not so pleasant. Is this the main reason people omit the wizard and have their own creation of objects and forms? I intend not to use the wizard anymore. Do you have any suggestion for me , a new Visual Foxpro user?
>>Nond...
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>There have been a few threads here recently about frameworks. I have spent all my time in my current job modifying applications created using the form wizard. I did not feel at liberty to tear them all down and rebuild them, so I worked with what I have. I made copies of all the classes in WIZSTYLE.VCX that needed modification and put them in my own class library. Mainly it's my own versions of the txtbtns class, which controls everything on a basic data navigation and entry form, and the searchform and searchclass classes, which are used when you click the Search button of the txtbtns class (or similar classes for vertical nav buttons, or whatever). I've modified them to the point where they more or less do what I want. I can take one of these apps made with the form wizard, replace the button bar with my own version of the button bar, and make it work. This is not a great framework, but it works for the old apps I'm currently working on.
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>The lessons I think we're getting from users here who are more experienced than me are: 1) it's not very feasible to use a new framework on an old application. You pretty much have to start over. That's why I still use a lot of WIZSTYLE.VCX code and controls. 2) These frameworks you can buy are great, but they take a long time to learn. I don't think I'm in a position to purchase and take the time to learn codebook, visual maxframe, or any of these others which have been mentioned here, but which I've never seen. The short term investment would be too great for my current employer. 3) The tastrade app is a good example to use. It was made for the purpose and has its own class libraries. I've never seen anybody here criticize it. If I am given the chance to re-create my applications from scratch, I will probably use it, both as an example of a good framework and as a source of actual classes and code.

Hi Bret,

Your words are wise, I have worked with Codebook for more than a year and I have studied all the other frameworks that have demo versions. Frameworks are excellent as long as you are prepared to stay within the framework. As soon as you try and modify the framework to suit your own needs it becomes very dangerous territory.
Tastrade is a good example (especially in VFP 5) and is not suprisingly very similar to Codebook. I certainly would recommend it as the place to start. My only criticism is the Error handler, it is garbage and makes working with Tastrade quite painful.

Darrel