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Good summary of the thoughts for the future -- still to make a living we must pick some technology and hope to ride it as long as possible. I have been writing programs for over 40 years and averaged a new language for each of those years -- yet for durability / longevitiy the "FOX" family has been one of my tools for 22 years -- with COBOL now a distant second.

My point is: at each point in my career, I have had to either "Fish or cut bait". Fishing is analogous to actually writing code for deployment. Cutting bait is learning / evaluating new technology for possible use.

Final advice: Stay flexible -- keep as up-to-date as possible while still earning a living with the tools you know. Best wishes for your successful choice of development platforms. Keep us posted!

>>Koos,
>>We are going down the same path right now. We decided to migrate to MySQL from VFP a while back for the back end database. Since only the front end will be VFP we are going to stay with it for a few more years. In the mean time we are looking for front end software to replace VFP that will run over the Web. .NET will be dead in another five to ten years as more and more apps migrate to the web.
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>>We build very large management systems and five years is not a long time in our life cycle. We always try to look at where things will be in five years and it is obvious that everything will be web based by that time. Look at all the Netbook computers being sold today with Linux and the numbers that Apple computer is doing today.
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>John --
>
>" .NET will be dead in another five to ten year" -- that's a bold statement.
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>While it is true that applications based on Windows Forms are probably going to go away (.NET is not really even enhancing Windows Forms any more), IMO .NET will stay live and well for a long time to come, because of WPF and Silverlight, which are both geared towards the web and provide an increasingly rich UI for web apps. MS and its partners and customers have invested way, way too much money in this platform to do away with it or let it die anytime soon. .NET is no VFP, which was allowed to wither on the wine because a) MS didn't have a huge investment in it and b) because it was seen as cannibalizing sales from other, more lucrative (for MS) products. When it comes to truly important products, MS will stick with them no matter what. Such as C++, which has been on the catalog for a long time already, and is now .NET based.
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>As for other platforms, Silverlight is supposed to run just fine in Linux and MacOS environments, because the entire system runs pretty well isolated within the browser and the host OS doesn't come much into play, at least on a low kernel level.
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>And while cloud computing is the flavor of the month today, it will be adopted only so far by corporations and big institutions because of concerns of security, data leaks, and availability. Still, even local or network applications and web apps are probably going to converge into one codebase and UI eventually, so that you can't really tell whether you are running in the cloud or locally.