Take a serious look at SilverLight, while you are at it. It is cross platform, it handles data quite well (especially if you use one of the available frameworks to do the heavy lifting) and it appears to be front and center as far as MS developer tools are concerned. Throw in Blend to do your visual design visually rather than in code (pain!), and you are good to go. Well, sort of. It is still a lot to learn.

I am creating a small application for a local jurisdiction's building department. nothing fancy, and I'm doing it for next to nothing just because I feel that I have to have a real project to sink my teeth into in order to stay with it and get it done. I just finished my first "Hello world" Silverlight application. The text "Hello world" is in "radiating gradient", looks like eye candy.

And now comes the hard part -- databinding with Silverlight and SQL server. Auch!

BTW, you can get all of the Silverlight & .NET tools you might possibly need from MS for free as long as you are planning to create real web applications with them. See http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark/ -- it's awesome.


>Think the web is the way to go? Look at Air, Flex, Php, Python (lots of frameworks), simple Lamp, Ruby on Rails they all have major installs around the world. Web tools are getting very good.
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