>>I also wonder why it is that I don't know any Visual ProMatrix users from the various user groups I have attended? Do they separate themselves from the FoxPro community? If so, why?
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>I wondered the same thing. Yes, ProMatrix users to separate themselves. They even have there own News Server so you don't have to use the microsoft one. As I said before I've used both ProMatrix & MaxFrame. What I found was the ProMatrix runs 'on top' of VFP - so to speak. Without going into a bunch of detail here, my problems with ProMatrix where that 1) Not flexable at all, and 2) It doesnt even use the VFP DBC! and 3) It prevents you from using many of VFP features. It is these last 2 reasons whey I think they've separated themsevles. Once a ProMatrix user started asking questions out here it would become obvious that their application was simply designed poorly. As for WHY ProMatrix has these issues - I think that the author (or authors) of the thing were really more 2.6 foxpro people - they didnt grasp the concept of DBC and views - and therefor left them out....and looking a ProMatrix to fix that problem is a complete re-write.
I was using the 5.1c and 6.0b versions of it, and the migration between the versions was, to understate it, tedious, and you had to run a separate update on each app for each sub-version (or should I omit the dash?) in specific order. One mistake and you had to restore from backup and start from scratch. Wasted hours on that (had about four apps for a dozen of customers... imagine the process), until I eventually put all these upgrade prgs and crammed them into one, and made it reentrant, so it didn't break if you accidentally run it twice (theirs did).
5.1 didn't support views; 6 did, but I had fooled the 5.1 to use a couple of views. Then they came up with an enterprise version which had support for remote views - only you had to have your apps using views already. The time between "can't use views" and "if you're using views we got good news for you" was about 18 months - there's no way I could have switched so many apps to use views, not under VPM.
They also still used a lot of public variables in VPM 6.0b - and allegedly had done away with them in later versions. The trouble is that most of these variables were the only way to tweak the framework's behavior, and references to them were scattered all over the code. Having them was bad enough; removing them would be a pending disaster.
Few other things annoyed me worse: the data entry forms use a bunch of key shortcuts for navigation, which is fine. Unfortunately, they are in effect as soon as you launch VPM, so you can't use ctrl+home, ctrl+end, ctrl+f1 while editing code. You don't have command window available unless you exit. There was no support for running off an UNC, so I had to hand-tweak the metadata to make that happen at runtime; there was no way to do that in development, because of some hardcoded things somewhere, it kept losing some locations.
The error handler is probably the worst experience I had with VPM: what it does is log the error (that's OK and pretty thorough, though the output from Display Memory is clogged by at least two pages of public vars and arrays), then closes all tables, then tries to resume running your app. Having the tables closed will get you another error within a few lines... so after about 60 clicks on Continue you lose patience and kill the beast, restart VFP and try to figure where you left off.
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