Organized, Systematic, Planned Approach
This chapter briefly describes the steps to take to build your first VPM Enterprise application. The subsequent chapters describe each step in detail.
We believe in an organized, systematic, planned approach to application development. We believe that an application should be substantially designed before the developer ever sits down at the computer to write code. This User’s Guide and the organization of VPM Enterprise reflect our belief in organization and planning.
Feel Free to Be Flexible!
You are about to learn the basic steps to create applications in VPM Enterprise. While we recommend that you follow the basic steps, you don’t have to! If you want to create forms before you’ve entered all your application’s menu options, go ahead — do it! If you want to use the Visual FoxPro Project Manager to organize your application development instead of the VPME Object Builder — do it! VPM Enterprise does not restrict your flexibility. It dramatically increases your flexibility because it puts at your fingertips tools that you don’t have with Visual FoxPro alone. VPM Enterprise also adds features to your applications that you would never have the time to develop yourself. That gives you more options. That gives you more flexibility.
