How many hours do you work per year? 1600 hours? For how many years have you written non-Linq code?

It's not how much non-linq code a developer has written - it's how much time invested in learning how to do it in the existing capabilities of ADO.NET or the List class. I'm going to post some code tomorrow to illustrate this.

We invested heavily to create our own visual elements such as tabs in FPW, only to see that work rendered obsolete when VFP was released. Ditto the changes from FPW C/S access to VFP. But if we already had all those features in "product x" and FP people were lecturing us to jump across because FPW is so much better, perhaps you'll agree that some people might feel satisfaction when VFP was released that they didn't jump earlier and spend happy hours learning to carve their own tabs and write DDE C/S calls.

It depends on whether there was a business requirement for them to do so. I had to use GenScreenX and GenTabx (or whatever they were called) to do tabs in FPW 2.6 back in 1994. Sure, I spent a few days figuring out how to use them....sure, I was glad when VFP 3 came out....but I (like many developers) had a requirement in front of me and had to solve a problem.

And this is an apples to oranges comparison....or more like apples to apple trees. FPW and VFP were products, .NET is a platform that is much larger by comparison. Even if I do things differently in LINQ, it doesn't mean that everything 'non-linqish' I did prior to LINQ gets tossed. (and even if it DID, it still solved a problem at the time).

You're speaking as if every developer has a choice on which version of a tool they have to use, and when they can decide to upgrade. This is something that any developer can face, regardless of whether it's a contractor, employee, etc.