Bret,

>If I understand correctly the advice Jim Booth gave me, frameworks should be built that way, with the buttons referring to methods in base form classes, making what he called a "contract between objects." TASTRADE works that way.

Yes, it's just the interface that you've designed the two components, your form and button group, to use to communicate with each other. Objects talking to each other basically breaks encapsulation. But non-trivial objects are pretty useless unless they can communicate with other objects. *s* You encapsulate what you can and define interfaces for everything else.

>My nav buttons use methods in my button bar container class, which can be neatly dropped on a form, WIZSTYLE-style, as someone here suggested. But if I want to use these buttons in a toolbar, I will have to start over.

Not really start over, you just use _screen.ActiveForm instead of thisform.