>Glen,
>
>Having done it both ways (I've used several commercial frameworks and rolled-my-own a coupla times too), I'd have to say that I agree with Morgan (and no, it's not just cuz I work with him <g>).
>
>When I was starting out with FoxPro (back in the 2.0 DOS days), I developed my own way of doing things, fully understanding all the nuts-and-bolts behind Fox and wrote several vertical market applications that way. Later, when my market niche started drying up, I branched out into consulting (for Fox apps) ... that's when I ran into several commercial frameworks that my various clients had been using. At first that resulted in a slow-down of my productivity, having to learn whatever framework the apps were written in before I could do much in the way of modifications. Once learned, ok no problem, but it seemed a bit of a PITA to me, since I already knew Fox inside-and-out at the time but still had to learn someone else's framework. OK, one could argue that I would have had to learn *something* anyway, since my client could have rolled their own framework instead of a commercial one and I'd still have to learn it. But, any custom framework a client might have written would, IMHO, still
>be easier to learn because the commercial frameworks, by necessity, have a lot of extra stuff in them so that they can be all things to all people.
>
>And, to argue in the other direction ... suppose all I knew was one commercial framework and I learned the language (be it .NET or anything else) through learning that framework. And then I had a consulting job for a client that did *not* have that framework, but already had existing code in place. Guess what ... I wouldn't know squat about the nuts-and-bolts of the language since I had never learned it to begin with. I suppose in that case, I probably wouldn't have gotten the job, but who knows ...
>
>Anyway, just felt like throwing in my 2 cents ...
>
>~~Bonnie


That was so well stated, it was worth about 4 1/2 cents... :D


Morgan