Thank you for the good advices.

>First, find a project and work to develop it. Maybe something you already did in VFP.
>Second, remember the words of Kevin McNeish. "If it's easy in VFP, it's difficult in .Net. If it's easy in .Net, it's difficult in VFP". You'll find things that don't work the "VFP way". That's on purpose. Don't expect them to be.
>
>Now for your questions
>- WinForms will get you up and running faster, but WPF has more capabilities. I'd go with WPF.
>- Most .Net devs I've talked to don't subclass controls unless they absolutely have to. To get started, I wouldn't go there. You can't visually subclass in .Net, so you're mucking with code and adding things to what you need to learn.
>- I haven't done enough with WPF to recommend a book. But much of that is subjective as we all have different skills and experience.
>- Other decisions:
>-- Keep things simple to start. Work on completing a specific project rather than "I want to learn .Net".
>-- Learn the proper terminology and how the different things (.Net Framework, VS, CLR, C#, etc) all fit together. With VFP, a particular version of the runtime was tied to a version of VFP. The runtime and IDE were pretty much the same thing. That's not the case with VS and .Net. VS is not tied to a specific version of the .Net Framework. C# and the .Net Framework are not the same thing.
>-- You have a couple of options for data access, ADO.Net or Entity Framework. EF is the way to go, but books are likely to use ADO.Net. You'll eventually need to learn some of both.
>-- Web searches are your friend. You'll need to do things that aren't in the books you have.
>
>Once you get desktop down, start looking at web or mobile.
>
>
>>OK, I am considering throwing in the towel. I have decided to give dotnet a try. I have read several books about C# and VB#, and I believe that I will be able to write some code relatively fast. But I don't want to start in the wrong end, I want to do it right from the start, so I ask for some advice.
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>>First of all, I have Visual Studio 2012 Professional installed and running on my computer. I also have MS SQL server 2012 installed and running. And I will focus on C#.
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>>One of my first questions is, should I use Windows Forms or WPF Forms?
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>>In VFP I have sub-classed all the base classes, some of them more than one level. Should I do the same in .net also? If so, how?
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>>Can anyone recommend a good book (or two) with essential but not too much reading?
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>>Are there other important decisions I will have to make early in my learning phase?
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>>And last, please don't mock me! I will always remain a VFP lover, and I know that I haven't always written nice things about dotnet. From now on I will avoid writing negative about dotnet until I know better what I am talking about.