>>> I haven’t really used VB but from what I have been told some stuff, like abstract factory, is easier to pull off in VB than C#. A breeze in VFP, I have yet to do the abstract factory in C# nor have I come across anyone who has. (A challenge to all?)

I've done something like this and it is pretty easy to do actually although it's far from what I call 'standard' data driven approach (in due time it will I suppose). You *do* have a good data engine in .NET that can use XML as the datastore locally and then use an ADO.NET Dataset to manipulate data. IOW, you don't need anything external like SQL Server or OleDb drivers etc.

Yes, it's more work than using a cursor in VFP (mainly because creation of files and data is much mroe work), but once you have the datastructure set up into an XML file, you can use a dataset (which loads and save to and from the XML with a single line of code) and it's fairly easy to manipulate the data. You can also use plain XML and a DOM interface to do the same thing, which works well too, but DataSets are easier and more manageable in terms of searching and manipulating the data. Performance is quite good as well - as long as the in-memory data isn't huge.

>Either way, that makes things *much* harder (more code-intensive and subject to implementation/installation/configuration hassles).

Another way to do this (depending on how much customization is required) is to use configuration objects which can persist the config information into XML. I've used this in Fox and that works very well too as long as the data voume is not excessive. This is a little less configurable though if you need to dynamically add things rather than to configure a fixed set of options (which is what I use the config files for). This is super easy in .NET with the XML serialization features - just create your object and call the serializer to persist or restore it.


>.NET V1 changes nothing in this single, vital respect. Alan, if you're reading, I notice that the strength of any software community seems directly and inexorably correlated with the strength of the community's metadata system.

I think it does and that meta data is XML along with the many ways that you can choose to manipulate it in .NET.

>Or, to put another way perhaps, the fragmentation of any software community seems inversely correlated with the strength of the community's metadata system. Could Ghandi create a consolidated C++ community? No. But with VFP it happens almost naturally, even spontaneously.

I don't really think this is a valid point. We've had a lot of metadata standards in VFP that never really took off. Lot of talk and even a lot of support by the 3rd party vendors but most people didn't actually use it and the vendors complained that it was eiether to difficult to work with the standard metadata or too limited in terms of functionality required.

There are lots of reasons that the VFP community is strong and meta data may be one of the reasons but it sure isn't the direct correlation that makes it so...

> If there's truth to any of this, then what are the strengths and weaknesses of the .NET / VS.NET metadata system? I think this matters a lot...

I think the .NET motto is to use XML for metadata and .NET's intrinisic support for XML at almost every level makes it possible to use metadata in many places easily. Again, it's not as easy as it is in VFP, but it's not a lot more involved. I think the main benefit of VFP is that hte dataengine is super rich and fast even with large data, while the XML engines in .NET are more limited in functionality (basically to internal non-optimized searching and transforming). This means for somethings that we can do with SQL or data commands in VFP you'd have to manually parse the XML data (or DataSet) by running through the data in a loop and manipulating. Still this is simple and doesn't add a lot of code or speed overhead especially if this sort of thing gets abstracted into classes where it belongs.

If anything using XML as the metadata improves interoperability to allow many other tools to access that same metadata. VFP data is only VFP centric which may or may not be important.