I disagree with your statement that everything before the iPhone had an inferior interface. I also disagree that .NET is inferior at data handling. It is different. It is not what we've been accustomed to for many years. It is hard to change how we think, but that's exactly what it takes to move from VFP to .NET.

One of the problems I see with VFP devs moving to .NET is they want to do things the way they did for years. In know...I was one of them. I see it all the time in forum posts. VB6 developers were able to manipulate data. Delphi developers were able to manipulate data. Other developers were able to manipulate data. Their methods were neither inferior nor superior to what we were doing with VFP. They were different. They did data manipulation on the back-end server. VFP devs want to do it all local, like they always had before.

I just started reading the book "Apprenticeship Patterns". In the preface, Ward Cunningham tells a story of he and Kent Beck talking about how to change the way people write programs. Ward said, "Never mind reality". In other words, you need to think differently to make big changes.

>Yes, he is looking at it from a VFP perspective. That's to be expected, of course. We have to look at the reality of a situation and not how it could/should be (except for efforts to submit suggestions and encourage new and better features). However, is your post saying "just get over that ease of use stuff and accept less?" Is it like telling the iPhone user (before the more capable competitors arrived) to just change their perspective and accept the inferior interface of a different cell phone? Granted, you might respond by saying there are more sophisticated data-handling capabilites in .NET in some ways, yet where is the ease of use? We've done sophisticated data-handling in VFP for quite some time and have not had to struggle to the extent you do in .NET. Wouldn't you say that VFP developers all go through this and feel like they've stepped back in time - they feel like their data handling capabilities have been hobbled? Isn't it frustrating when you know how it can be and others in the industry - those who've never used VFP - just seem to accept it and never expect more?