Gary,

>This may well be true but my reality is that all I see everyday on the joblists are .NET positions. The "millions of businesses" don't seem to be hiring VFP developers at the moment ;)

One of the problems really is to find well trained VFP developers. The sad reality is that a lot of folks out there are really not the experienced VFP developers the market is looking for. I've been lucky with my team as I don't really care where they live, but a colleage of mine who requires on site programming and good knowledge of the dutch language is looking for VFP talent for quite a few years now. Up to now he tried quite a few people, but could not find an suitable candidate.

One thing we did two years ago is take some bright guy, send him off to steven black for training and he turned out to be a real asset to the company. Of course it will take time to become a master VFP programmer, but he's better than a lot of folks programming foxpro for a decade or more.

As someone said before, programming is about solving problems. The issue of which programming language to use is relative. Going to .NET won't make good programmers out of bad ones.

For me the market is about providing client solutions. The client does not care whether it is programmed in language X or Y, It likes to see well working software. It is your choice whether you use language X or Y, but you'd better be well informed about the advantages and disadvantages before doing so, it might save a lot of dissapointments. Don't be on the bleeding edge, just for the sake of beeing of the bleeding edge.... It has to provide some benefit..

Walter,