Hi, John.

>Many people will stay working in VFP for years, other may wait a year or so to have LINQ released and stable, other may start (or have started already) working in other platforms. In .NET you can used typed or untyped dataset, DTOs, full business object or other meanings for data access, and you don't even need to choose a single one.
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>Do you have no opinion/advice beyond generalities? ;-) I feel as if I've gone to a doctor and been told "if your chest pain is a heart attack I'll admit you, but if it's only indigestion I'll give you medicine. There is no single answer."

>Of course there is no single answer. But what to do? There are pointers and standard advice that leads towards each unique answer. I'm not a leader, we have MVPs for that. Don't we? We need to move beyond generalities if we are professionals and that means engaging and comparing features. We can't make decisions for each other but reviewing the facts and reporting findings is a crucial first step. IMHO.

ROFL! Yes, of course I have an opinion, but there is really no single easy answer, as you said. Actually, I'm trying to provide some guidance for specific scenarios in my articles and sessions, and answering specific questions here with particular scenarios.

In a broader sense, what I have been advising in the last years to most developers feeling that VFP could not cover their expectations mid-term because of lack of skilled programmers, market perception or any kind of technological issue, was to start learning other platform like Java or .NET. Generally speaking, for people with no exposure to the IT market outside of the Microsoft platform, I strongly recommend .NET.

And to start right now as a learning exercise, I would with what's currently released and stable. If you are not in a hurry, you may go on with VFP and wait 1~2 years and land to .NET with LINQ fully implemented and embraced by a supporting community.

Then, whether to go the dataset or business object route, if my own preference is business objects, but for people who never really worked with BOs in VFP, but with a purely data-driven (client/server) approach with no domain models, I would recommend to look at datasets first and get a good hang on how relational data is handled in the framework. Indeed, for many applications with no really complex business logic, they could go on and be very happy and productive with datasets, even if they have their quirks.

For people who actually built domain-models in VFP, I guess working on .NET with business objects would be great, and I recommend taking a look at a good framework like CSLA or the more complete Mere Mortals. For more hard-core people NHibernate is also great -with some limitations, and for complex enterprise scenarios I will do the same path and then go to something like EntLib, which I definitively DON'T recommend for non-enterprise apps or small teams.

So, this is not an advise, but just a menu. Following your doctor analogy, I won't believe in any diagnosis formulated by email, and this short check-list should be better discussed with your physician. 8-)

Best regards,