If you inherited yesterday complete or majority ownership of say one insurance company, so every IT related expence as from tmrw would hv been directly deducted from your profits;

Under presumption that there is line of of mission critical projects needed as they say 'for yesterday' ;

Which DevTool/Database Platform would you be willing to pay for right now ?

You know your fees, you know complexities, so be honest.

I understand your question, but the problem is that there are so many major factors that you didn't cover. You haven't mentioned anything about the types of applications, user install base, environment, etc.

There are more .NET contractors than VFP contractors out there...and I can handle contractor costs against my bottom line differently than payroll expenses.

But if it were my decision, odds are high that I'd likely select VS2005, the .NET 3.0 Framework, and SQL Server '05. I've been working with different versions of these products for over 5 years now.

Kevin