There are lots of options.

Do you go with all MS tools, or do you add 3rd party? Currently, the "preferred" way to access data is Microsoft Entity Framework, but many people use NHibernate, which is open source and basically does the same thing.

Do you want web-based or Windows-based? If Windows-based, the current UI platform is WPF, but Winforms may work for you. For web, do you go with MVC instead of WebForms (IMO, there should be no discussion on this one. Go with MVC). You can also use Silverlight for the UI.

For reporting, you can do with SQL Server Reporting Services or something 3rd party.

Is C# the way to go? VB will do everything C# will.

Bottom line, there are still lots of questions you need to ask both the CIO and your team. Perhaps some discussions with the .NET experts will help you decide. Classes will help you learn how to code in .NET, but pretty much do nothing to teach best practices or how to properly architect your .NET application.

Just switching to .NET will not solve your backlog problems. Using best practices for architecture, coding, project management will go along ways. These are things like unit testing, continuous integration, agile, design patterns, etc.

>I was having a discussion with our CIO who doesn't know anything about Visual FoxPro (9) and has only experience with Classic ASP and VB and he thinks they were great.
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>He also said that once we get a better programming language (C#) that because it is more efficient all our problems (being behind schedule, etc.) will go away. He also speculated that there were some great 3rd party tools that would make the data access better in C#. Of course, my experience with C# is a couple of web apps that I wrote, using MereMortals .NET and watching videos on LearnDevNow.
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>I just do not believe that our problems are because of FoxPro.
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>Most of the coding we do is grab data from flat files provided by the State and push the data into FoxPro tables or SQL Server tables and beat the data up and create PDF reports and spreadsheets. So, we really need and use commands like APPEND FROM SDF or Delim, SCAN FOR, Update, Insert, Replace data in current row, SQL Select etc.
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>Does anyone know of some magical C# tools that will take the place of those useful FoxPro one-line commands? And I'm not talking about BOs here. No, I doubt it. I think for APPEND FROM (with a FOR) SDF that you would have to write a custom parser for each input in .NET.
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>Bottom line is that I believe that our efficiency and productivity will go down and we will need more programmers not less.
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>Yes, I know FoxPro is dead and I'm dying to program in C# only, but what is the truth?