Hi Pertti,

See my comments below.

>Stephen:
>
>>Pertti, Meta Data has been around longer then VFP, so using it is not unique to Fox. I have used a DD playing with VFE as well as Report Writing tools. I found it a pain to set up, and the savings you received were not nearly as great as the time it took to set it up on the front end. YMMV.
>
>Of course it has been, in the form of ini, header, etc. -files -- that's nothing new or special. What makes a big difference, though, is how dynamic it is and how you use it. The pain in VFE data dictionary, I think, is the fact that it doesn't hook up to a real CASE tool. So, you have to do a lot of rather tedious and error prone typing before you can get the app running. With a CASE tool, stuff like view generation, data integrity, default value generation, PK generation, data entry formatting and input masks, etc. becomes a breeze.


It must have been a much older version of VFE you worked with. The VFE Data Dictionary is very intuitive and speeds up database design quite a bit. I found it very simple to use and it added quite a few features missing from vanilla VFP. Also, VFE works very well with xCase. Simply update your database container from xCase and then validate your database containers in the Visual FoxExpress IDE. Nothing else is required.


>
>>Using the BizObjects in MM.NET are real easy to pull the data you need whe you need it. In the MM.Net product you will learn how the VPM product did it's voodoo behind the scenes.
>
>Yes, BizObjects in MM.NET do make data manipulation relatively easy (although, in my opinion, data manipulation should really be in a separate layer, leaving business objects to take care of the rules that the backend server doesn't handle).
>
>All I'm saying is this: an active datadictionary coupled with a good CASE tool makes design and maintenance a WHOLE lot easier and consistent than writing a lot of that stuff by hand and having to re-build the project after each change.


I agree.