>t's also a path that some of us are going to have to follow since the "change" of development from a profession into a commodity controlled by vendors now seems irreversible.

I respectfully beg to differ on that one. I've been building a custom VFP application for my home county's planning department for the last 15 years, and there is no end in sight. This year, for instance, I've been busier with this beast than ever before. Every year (around the end or/and the beginning of the fiscal year) the department heads talk about scrapping my system and buying a multimillion dollar replacement from some vendor or another. Then they get down to the nitty gritty of what they want the system to do (they want everything MY system does) and they realize that with all of the customizations the already high prize more than doubles. Then they call me for another annual contract. As it turns out, off-the-shelf software is often quite unsatisfactory, because no software can meet a changing set of specific needs. Not a commodity by a long shot.

To create an effective system one has to immerse oneself into the client's way of doing business, and there is no Swiss Army Knife that feels comfortable in every hand and does everything well. Custom programming will be around, I think, for decades to come.

As for change management with the eternally morphing MS .NET versions, that is a tough one. As others have said here, the ones who held back and waited for the platform to mature have conserved a lot of energy and painkillers that the leading-edgers have wasted. The constantly changing paradigms from one version to another are simply infuriating for the troops in the trenches. Just when you buy into one whizzbang technology (e.g., Linq), in comes another one to replace it. It reminds me of my own time in the actual trenches: Just when I had calibrated my trusty sniper rifle to consistently hit a walnut from 1,000 feet away, the Army brass in their unfailing wisdom took it away and gave me another, supposedly much better rifle. Now I had to learn to calibrate the new rifle while the walnuts continued to taunt me from a distance...

I don't think there is all that much new under the sun anymore as far as programming is concerned. Object orientation was probably the last huge improvement, but now vendors seem to be going around and around with incremental improvements, some of which are actually no improvements at all. Take XAML for example, please. It has been around for a few years already, and only now its biggest proponent (MS) is coming out with a well integrated graphical design interface for it. Once you get used to dragging and dropping objects onto a design surface and quickly setting their various properties, events and methods, going back to doing almost everything by hand again is painful and unusually cruel. It is like going back to using @ x, y SAY -statements to create a report in Foxpro rather than using the report designer. There is something seriously wrong with all this circular evolution.