Thank you for your valuable input. It's sad to confess, but I have been offered Kevin's book for free several times, without accepting it. My excuse was always that I would have to pay overweight to bring it home, but the truth is that I was just too stubborn, I didn't want to get involved in .net. :-)

Now Whil has some problems with his website, so I can't order it from him directly, as an e-book. I actually tried to order it yesterday, but Whil had posted that his web shop would be down until middle of March. I will try Amazon later today, unless someone has an extra copy to spare.

The thing is, I am a candidate for a job as a programmer at a local big software company, and I want to prepare myself in case they decide to hire me. However, I don't know which platform(s) they use, so I will have to focus on one, and be prepared to adapt later.

>OK, several things...
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>First, everyone mentioned Kevin McNeish's book,, .NET for VFP Developers. It is essential reading.
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>Second, while a bit dated, another forum member (I think it was Gerard O'Conner, but might have last name wrong), posed a similar question back in 2004. I gave him a reply that I think was of some benefit to him and others. It's Message #942669
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>Third, while this will take a bit of time, there's a wealth of information in the UT .NET forum posts, dating back to 2001. Between 2001 and 2003 I asked about a billion questions that were answered by people like Cathi Gero, Bonnie Berent, Rick Strahl, Kevin McNeish, Dave Froderick (sp?), and others. Then there were people like Einar and Mike Cole and many others who asked a number of questions a few years later. Since you're a subscriber, you can search through the messages. Yeah, it'll take some time, but there's a wealth of material on this forum. In particular, I'd say about 95% of what Bonnie posted between 2002 and 2006 on .NET was pure gold. And in more recent years, Viv Phillips has answered a large # of questions as well. So I can't stress enough how much good content there is here on the UT.
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>Fourth, I wrote some Baker's Dozen articles in Code on .NET topics of interest to VFP developers:
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>http://www.codemag.com/Article/0703092 (13 tips for moving from .VFP to .NET)
>http://www.codemag.com/Article/0411081 (13 tips for enhancing the data grid)
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>In retrospect, while I was targeting an intro/intermediate audience, I could have explained a few things a little better. As with anything, never be shy about asking questions.
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>There are other articles in the history of CoDe that cover .NET topics of interest to VFP people.
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>Fifth, I mentioned that subclassing is different in .NET. It's also important to understand interfaces and generics (something I talk about in my CoDe article on moving from .VFP to .NET). A few VFP people who dabbled in .NET tried to minimize the value of interfaces - if you ever come across that, ignore it. Interfaces are important.
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>Sixth, check out the offerings on Pluralsight. They have great training content.
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>Seventh, I would say start with WinForms and then work your way to WPF. Things like WinForms and ADO.NET/Typed DataSets are certainly viewed by some as "older" by some, but the truth is that they're still used enough. (more on that issue in a minute)
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>Related, I would say that ASP.NET and really anything delivered through the browser is just as important, maybe even more important than WinForms/WPF. John Baird can help out more on the mobile development than I can.
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>I'll make one controversial statement that JB and others will likely smack me for - but I would only invest serious time in WPF if there's any indication you'll get involved in those types of projects. It's not that it's not important, it's just that there are others arguably even more important.
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>Eighth, of all the sub-frameworks in the history of .NET, one of the best (IMO) is WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). There are still people out there using the older style web services and remoting and they certainly work, but WCF is awesome. I would definitely invest some time.
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>And finally - if you're going to get involved in the App-Dev side of things, you'll likely want to get exposed to a reporting tool. Until 2007 I had zero kind words to say about SSRS, but the truth is that it's improved enough to be a good general web reporting tool for SQL installations.
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>OK, so read all that tonight. Tomorrow I'll have a longer list (haha). Just kidding. Like Craig said (and as I'm sure you know), much of this is just building a few dummy demo apps. You'll make a ton of mistakes and slam your fist a million times and struggle to word questions - it's all part of the learning curve. But ultimately you should benefit.
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>One final note. There's a general issue you're going to encounter at some point - maybe not now, but later - that .NET has going through several iterations. For instance, at one point ADO.NET was enormously popular, though some moved to other approaches over time. However, it's still "tried and true" and used by many application developers. Many data access components out there utilize ADO.NET under the hood. That's just one example, there are plenty of others.
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>One of the things I've learned is that even as an independent, I still can't always dictate that I'll use the latest and greatest tools and functionality for a client project. It it's a client project with other developers and there's some legacy code (or legacy mindsets), it might not always be possible to get them to use newer features. This is a reality that (sadly) just doesn't get discussed enough. Recently I had to troubleshoot and fix some very old .NET code - it was critical and painful, but necessary. I'm not saying you need to bone up on every aspect of 10 years of .NET history - but be aware that these things can come up.
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>Yes, it's a ton, but you've got people here to help.