I look at .NET and its future (Windows Azure, cloud computing in general) to be a very dangerous thing. It's the ability to mine data running on remote servers, monitor and spawn off copies of data transactions, or any number of other data spying / monitoring features that become possible with for-fee services.
A man named Eben Moglen warns about this on a few YouTube videos worth watching. These two are from talks given in 2012. Eye opening:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKOk4Y4inVYhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2VHf5vpBy8>>That's even many of the VFP developers and posters here advocating .NET-based solutions
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>I am not sold on .NET solutions -- to me it is nothing more that a framework with custom classes as wrappers for the windows API. Why go this route and add the overhead of this massive framework. I think that if you want an application framework as a foundation, there are probably better ones out there that are slimmer in size (I haven't looked only guessing here...). As for the API, the programmer can access these as needed in their own classes and build their own library over time.
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>Will the licensing model for .NET change -- don't know. But with .NET you are again at the mercy of Microsoft on this and we all know how revenue hungry they are. Win8 revenue is way down from what I have read -- will they start to look for alternative sources... To me, if I migrate away from VFP the answer would be an open solution -- C++ based with the abiltiy to move to any platform (windows, linux, mac, ...). I have programmed in the past in C++ and could pick it back up -- just not have had a need to. .NET is windows only and why tie yourself to a single platform if you are starting "fresh" again?
