Hi, I've been playing around with VFP now for about 8 months and am working on my first app, a conversion of a FP/DOS app. In the process I've created a couple of my own classes, nothing special, using the visual design tools that come with VFP. I also noticed that a lot of people seem to be hand-coding their classes and then instantiating them with the CREATEOBJECT() function. I can see that, when someone is looking for help in a forum such as this, you can't give them an example in a VCX file without attaching it and generally annoying everyone else. This makes at least one obvious advantage to coding classes by hand, the ability to spread them around by email. I have to admit that coding seems more like real programming than using the visual tools and, as silly as that reasoning is, I have to admit that's one of the reasons I never used the Screen Builder in FP/DOS. However, I have to think that, if you're going to hand code there must be some advantages other than that. Perhaps a hand-coded subclasses are less resource-intensive or whatever. What exactly are the advantages to writing the code rather than using the visual design tools? (Obviously I'm not talking about non-visual classes here.) I gave some thought to this this morning and the list below is what I came up with. Visual Tools Advantages Objects can be created more quickly with the visual tools. Placement of objects in a form is done by clicking with a mouse rather than writing multiple lines of code. Disadvantages The visual tools tend to hide the workings of the language from you. You don't really see what's going on when you're clicking away with a mouse. This is not a disadvantage if you don't care what's going on. It is more difficult to send an object via email if it was designed by a visual tool. If you do it, you are more likely to annoy a lot of people. Hand Coding Advantages Hand coding gives you a better understanding of what is going on in the language. You can send code via email which you can't do with a VCX or SCX unless you attach them. In a mail list or Usenet newsgroup situation, this is most certain to annoy a lot of people. It is much easier to change the class on which the object is based if the object is hand coded. It is possible to do this with a visually designed object but it is much harder and may require an additional tool (class browser). On the other hand, how often do you do this? Disadvantages Hand coding results in slower development than using the visual tools.