Hi John,

>>>From my own personal observation, which you could easily verify, a very large percentage of devlopers who frequent the UT and who fall into the highly qualified class of developers have moved onto .net.
>
>Nobody here disagrees that many developers have decided to move to dotNET. That doesn't mean that the need for LINQ has not been obvious for a long time. Put another way: not everybody here had to wait until MS announced it before they saw the need for themselves. Some shrugged and moved regardless. Some decided to wait until the need was met. Others completely missed the whole point, but felt very clever.

Well, it seems the old point again of switching a tool just because of business opportunities, not neccesarilly saying anything about the quality of the tool. I do understand OTOH why web developpers like RickS went to .NET, because it clearly has advantages on the big picture.
Also KevinMcNeish saw a business opportunity to start something totally fresh not saying anything about the quality of the tool itself. For the rest a lot of the so called 'highly qualified class' developers the motives are less clear if you ask me.

The way I see it is that .NET still is immature. The fact that VS.NET only now is looking to integrate data into the product just proves my point. For a lot of companies having huge investment in their often very complex products IMO, .NET currently is not an alternative. I'm stengthened in my point by recent statements from JohnK saying that he could not advise VFP developpers going to .NET.

As for the LINQ project, we still have to see how this is going to take shape. The examples I've seen are pretty simplistic and nowhere near the functionality found in data munging in VFP. I do see some interesting development though in programming generic algorithms, but I don't have a clue yet what this means for highly data driven/intensive applications. Also, are datasets beeing able to flush to disk? To me this is also very important as we do have quite a few applications running on TS/Citrix where the amount of memory held by an application is important.

Meanwhile we will sit back, not ignoring .NET, but carefully watch what is happening. Listening to the experience of other developpers, hitting and solving the big problems. I suspect meanwhile we will get the amusement of several prophets (as we did have one in the past) talking the hype, but meanwhile does not have a clue what they are talking about.

2+ years seems to be enough to make a decision about our future development. Time will tell.

Walter,