In my experience, it depends on how much time you can actually spend working with the tool. I spent a couple of years learning C# off and on but never really worked with it so I kept having to 'relearn' the same stuff over and over again during that time period. However, once I actually started working with it everyday, it was really about 3-4 months before I was comfortable with it. That includes a standard for programming practices, a design pattern (MVP in our case), and being able to figure out how to code what I needed to accomplish. That doesn't mean I was overly knowledgeable about it (I probably never will be simply because there is more information in dotnet than I can ever learn or access so I will probably always be a newbie developer when it comes to .net), just able to code and meet business requirements :o) It is similar to VFP in some ways: you learn what you need to know in order to meet a business requirement. Just as some vfp developers have never worked with a separation of layers, xml or passing data to and from pdf forms, but then they may never need to. If there was never a requirement, they maybe never even touched on it. When you have a business requirement, you learn what you need to in order to meet it :o)

Fortunately, there is a wealth of information out there on the internet on how to do just about anything in .net. Some good, some not so good, some just not applicable to your needs. For example, when I first started researching how to handle hundreds of reports in .net, it was very easy to find examples for Crystal and SSRS working directly with the data in the backend but I couldn't find anything that showed how to handle it when the data is pushed to the report from the app and it comes from entity classes in a separate layer. We've figured it out since then, but the majority of the examples were not anything close to what we needed.

I don't know which learning curve would be faster: java or .net. There are some folks out there who regularly work with both so perhaps they can answer.






>To develop a certain system, we are analyzing different options with a potential client.
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>One is to develop the system with well-known tools - Visual FoxPro, a framework, and some additional tools I added. In this case, I can give a reasonable estimate for the time required (once I know a little more about the requirements).
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>Another is to develop in some other programming language. We were specifically discussing the possibility of using Java.
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>As much as I know that I have to learn a new language sooner or later, this makes me quite nervous, in the sense that I don't know how long it will take to learn Java well. I did learn the basics (which I would have to review again...), in a Java course, but that didn't include database access. Also, creating the visual interface seemed quite cumbersome to me; in any case, I would have to learn that. (In this older course, it was done with AWT; I understand that recently the recommended alternative is SWING.)
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>So, the question is - In order to give my client a reasonable time estimate, how long would it take to learn Java well enough, so that I can develop a complete business system? For those who switched to .NET, how long did it take them? I would guess the time estimated would be similar in both cases.
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>Later I will see what additional tools I need; probably a good GUI, for a start, perhaps some classes. For a first step, what concerns me most is the time estimate.
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>TIA,
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>Hilmar.