>Why is everyone so shocked at the Dynamic Screen concept?

Largely because I hadn't ever heard of it. I was aware you could progamatically create things, just as you do visually, but...

> Ever heard of a Factory?

Not outside the context of its common usage.

>It's practically how FoxPro compiles.

How is that? Don't to sound stupid, that is if by factory you don't mean a building or set of buildings with facilities for manufacturing...

>This concept is as old as FoxBase and Clipper. It was usually referred to as "Data Driven". Art Fuller was big on this, about 8 years ago, with his ArtFull library. (Which I thought was great).

That's all a bit before my time. I've only been programming for about 3 years now. I'm learning alot, so if my ignorance seems like stupidity, I apologize in advance. This just sounds really useful, so I am very curious.

>The benefit was to be able to make screen changes without having to recompile. Changes to a table structures did not require a new application program. Validation routines could be custom called via macros etc. It made customization easy and could even be used to allow a client to add or remove known fields.

That does sound really nice.

>I would say that the technique has been obsoleted by object oriented languages like VFP. That may be why the VB guys were doing it.

This idea seems like it would still be very relevant today, despite the emergence of OOLs. I mean classes and dynamic screens touch on different areas. With dynamic screens you are talking about the ability to adapt to new situation, which is one of the cornerstones of programming (e.g. don't hard code). Essentially, it seems almost like when we make these layouts visually we are hardcoding them...So I find this concept very appealing. It had occured to me vaguely in the back of mind. Using objects is along the same lines, but there we are talking about encapsulation, polymorphism, code reuse, etc.