>>>>There are a lot of .NET developers out of work here, too. As you say, things have been tough all over. I have invested quite a bit of time in learning .NET, both formal classes and self-study, and have not been able to get a foot in the door without work experience. In a more robust economy sometimes people are given that first chance based on general skills, how they present themselves in the interview, etc. These days it seems like employers are saying the want X years of experience and insist on it. I don't blame them. If you have a pool of experienced applicants, what motivation is there to take a chance on someone with none? (in the particular skill(s) you are looking for)
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>>>>IMHO, this is a red herring. The toughest part of software development is understanding the nature of the business problem and devising an appropriate solution. Writing the coede is the easy bit.
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>>>If this were the case, that "writing code is the easy bit", re-writing VFP application that has been working for years and therefore already past the state of "understanding the nature of the business" to .NET would be "easy." Maybe it is/was for you but you can't say it is the same for everybody.
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>>But I think a lot of the problem with that can be related to the stuff VFP let you do ( some might say "get away with" and that we all did perhaps early on as self-taught developers. If you have an app that binds forms to data, the data is dbfs, the networking concurrency handling is dodgy, there is little design but a lot of 600 line methods etc ...
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>>But a well designed, n-tier VFP app against SQL using remote views or SPT ... pretty much as Marsha says. Once the business problem has been solved, i just find it liberating to have a whole lot of new tools to use to move the app to the next level.
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>Ok, we agree to disagree there <g>
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>What about reports in .NET world? I am in the process of creating a couple of reports in .NET using Crystal Reports. Even though I am using a pretty good book (written by Kevin Goff) I find that creating a report with Crystal Reports in .NET is 100-times more time consuming and complicated than in VFP.

IMO the ReportViewer control in ASP.NET is pretty straightforward and it gives you more capabilities than VFP ever did.. SSRS bundles all that into a standalone user-configurable web application.