Hi Michael,

>To be perfectly sure I understand- If I make a master include file to call my other header files and set the master include file as the include file for the form this will take care of the entire form.

If you have controls based on your classes, you have to set the include file for each class where the replacements are needed. If you do this by automatically inserting the include file by hacking the vcx /scx files, this will slow down your turn-around time for total rebuilds.

On a rather large project the compile time for the whole project was brought down from 56 minutes to 18 minutes (needed if a change in a header file was sure to ripple out to all project parts for instance switches for "instrumenting code"), when I changed the header files from a global approach (all header files >> master file) to an app centric approach
(framework header files + app specific header files >> application header files). My measurements seem to indicate that the header files are re-read for each method of the class ! In "normal" working (changing a few methods, then saving the class) that save is "snappier" : you have perhaps a sum of 30 to 100 lines of nethod code to compile, but you add a couple of thousand lines by rereading all the header files. But it is very bad when you have to recompile all. And on a team with more than 10 developers it really begin to cost project time.

Yes, having all header files centralized makes life easier for the developer, but it can hinder productivity on very large projects. Just keep the flip side of your efforts in mind - and that you CAN always do something about it.

my 0.02 EUR

thomas