>But my point was that if one is going to spend a lot of time getting up to speed on something beyond VFP, I found that 2 things were very attractive in .NET - an IDE that was the subject of vast MS resources and third party support,

On a fast machine and on long sessions - yes. I sometimes work on a VM setup where vfp is borderline ok but Dotnet truly sucks - especially the startup lag common to java and the CLR.
Also if I don't carry the big laptop but only the netbook I refrain from touching Dotnet
[that relativly new machine received Office97, vfp and CPython for in between tasks...]

> and the ability to actually Google for answers when VFP support is only, maybe, sometimes available on UT from a continually diminishing pool of experienced users.

Yupp. And the quality for the Dotnet stuff is better IMHO compared to "small" java OS projects

> I am continually thrilled at how many resources there are for quickly finding answers to development challenges in .NEt and I can't imagine seeking out some obscure language a guy wrote in Uzbekhistan (however brilliant, technically elegant and "fox friendly") if he and his brother and six guys on the internet were the only people who'd ever heard of it <g>

Big yes and small caveat: in vfp there are some resources I trust A LOT after having read a lot of their code [Strahl, Hennig, Kramek...] while in the big Dotnet world I have to read the code more carefully.

>I see a lot of discussion here about not leaving Fox until one finds a technically brilliant language that doesn't involve a lot of typing <s> Not sure those should be the criteria. I program mostly in VB .net - surely the most verbose of the CLR langauges - and I'm constantly surprised at how little typing I do to get so much code.

Actually here we differ probably most - I think autogenerated code is a step in the wrong direction, as the maintainer has to read the generated stuff as well. Might have something to do with the fact that I am much faster rewriting/fixing code than discussing new features with clients - so seldom have the "clean slate" but often have to decipher 5 generations of different maintainance work...

Grokking fast is my target - and here Python [and Boo, which currently falls in the "six guys" pocket]
gives me a boost. And I remember working in a lot of computer languages.
"Code Behind" was a neat solution to a problem that should never have arisen <g>.

regards

thomas