57 is nothing! Besides, this is not like starting anew -- your brain is wired like a programmer's brain already, so learning .NET is not like learning a whole new life skill -- it is more like learning a new dialect. At this point it is more of a mindset than anything else, really.

If you can, try getting a relatively simple programming project going for your community, school, church, whatever, and do it in .NET. Do it for free (you might need to do your programming in the dog house for spatial and spousal reasons), and once you get it up and running ask the forever grateful recipients of your free masterpiece to spread the world about the new .NET Stud for hire! That should get the ball rolling, and next thing you know you'll be living mainly in the .NET area of UT with the occasional sentimental detour to the Fox Archives.


>Hey, I'm 62 and the transition from Fox to .net has made programming fun again. .NET is really not that difficult but it requires a willingness to stop believing anything that isn't the same as we did it in Foxpro is somehow harder or wrong or only because the people doing it don't know how cool the Fox way was.
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>You can do this. The trick is to get functional fast so - the very thing that made Fox so approachable. I chose to do that by adopting a framework written by former fox folks which made the whole data handling hurdle much lower. Then I could concentrate on the language and the .NET framework.
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>The great thing is the amount of material available for learning and the communities of developers that are very reminiscent of what we had in Fox 15 years ago. Go to stackoverflow.com for example and you'll see a forum where technical questions are often answered within one minute and they have 50 Sergeys <s>
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>In a year you can be a 57 year old, experienced developer who can get things done in c#. Right now that is a lot more marketable than a 30 year old Foxpro Guru.
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>Remember how exciting it was when you first learned Fox and felt how powerful it was? .NET right now is really, really powerful and the IDE, community, and power of the language exceeds anything we've known in Fox even in it's heyday.
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>>Guys, I have run into very little FoxPro work since my lay-off back in November of last year, 2008. The jobs are becoming more and more scarce. IT Departments shoot it down. Microsoft kills it too by its decision to not market the Fox.
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>>Visual FoxPro is still an outstanding product. It is probably more popular outside of the United States and Canada than here in north America.
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>>Compared to Microsoft's .NET products, and I did research to prove this, there are few opportunities with the Fox now. When you go to, for example, http://www.indeed.com, and put in FoxPro and a city and state, FoxPro comes up with 0 to 1, or maybe as high as 2 opportunities, but Visual Basic and C# come up with 40, 50 or hundreds of opportunities depending on the city you look at. We can still build good apps in VFP, but if no one offers work in VFP, but only in JAVA, ColdFusion, VB, ASP.NET, or C#, then you have to go with the market, which in my case, means completely retraining.
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>>At age 56, it is very difficult to stop everything going on in my life and retrain mself to some other software development tool and who is going to hire a 56-year old man who just started learning C#?
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>>I guess I need some cheese with my wine, right?
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>>I've even taken California's teacher exam called CBEST in order to qualify me to teach here, but they are not hiring anyhere in the 11 school districts I've called.
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>>For years I've loved using Visual FoxPro and the old FoxPro for all of my development; it made sense.
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>>Any advice is genuinely appreciated. I am feeling kind of lost now.