Pertti, not to beat this to death but what are you doing with views in .NET anyway? Remove views in VFP are great but now that your out of the DBC, what good is all that anyway?

Do you use Datasets or pipelines for fetching data in .NET? In my only app in .NET I used MSDE for storage and DataSets for holding data for manipulation. How will a case tool help in this manner? I use to work with the Sybase product but am no longer affilated with that employer.

I just used Visio for this .NET project. Not great but it did diagrams for show to my programmer.

Are you coding trigers into your backend?

You said "stuff like view generation, data integrity, default value generation, PK generation, data entry formatting and input masks, etc. becomes a breeze."

I see this as pure GUI interaction past the intergrity item. I let the backend do my keys, I never manufacture them. Default values, when needed it's pretty easy in code to drop them in. Formating of data and input masks, never use them.

Can the VPM act like this in a Web environment? I'm just doing Web based apps in .NET.

__Stephen


>Stephen:
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>>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.
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>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.
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>>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.
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>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).
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>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.