Hi, Alex.
Not exactly the same, of course, but you have several options available for that.
>1) Now that LINQ in on the way, it would be nice if .NET included an efficent (fast - Rushmore) standalone local data storage standard. Sort of like a DBF on steroids: 64 bit, with long column names (32 chars is enough for me), with indices, buffering and native data encription. Naturally, it could be SCANed, included in an exe file, accesed directly from Excel, etc.
SQL Server Compact Edition is something you can embed into your application, it is free to use and distribute, and allows you to work on the client machine. It can't run as a server per-se, though, but you can use SQL Server Express (also free) for that, or the full commercial editions for heavier stuff. All versions of SQL Server are quite efficient, so you shouldn't have much problems achieving the same speed.
You may also want to take a look at VistaDB, which seems a great product to me.
In any case, yes, the data access code will tend to be more complex until you get your reusable classes in place. After that, it shouldn't be too different. The main difference in .NET/Java is that you have to deal with more plumbing stuff at first.
>2) A "dynamic language mode" that allowed a command window with full language access during development. While they were at it, it allowed the creation and compilation of snippets at run time.
IronPython is a free, open source dynamic language for .NET, and it has a command window very similar to the VFP one. I'm sure this kind of features (as well as more dynamic inference) will finally get added to the main languages one way or the other. In the meantime it is nice to have IronPython installed to be able to use the Command Window no matter which language you program in.
While I like many ideas on the dynamic space, I would say that working on a strongly-typed environment is a great way to produce safer code, even more now that we have a good generics implementation. I'm pretty sure you'll appreciate it when you start using it.
Regards,
