>Don't you have the feeling that even the most experienced VFP developers >sometimes feel like roadkill on some of these technologies? It's VERY >difficult to keep up....

Oh, absolutely. And it's not like any of these technologies can just be skimmed over, like you could with a lot of the DOS or even Win3.x stuff. No, you can't "know a little COM", you've got to have a pretty good knowledge just to use it in more than in a trivial manner. XML? By the time you've figured out enough to make use of it, you've pretty much figured it out. And the list goes on.

Believe me, I feel your pain. Suppose for the moment you're a hypothetical (*cough*) tester at Microsoft, working on VFP. Suppose one of the things you're responsible for testing is VFP COM servers. Okay, so in order to test VFP COM servers in all possible environments, and in as thorough a manner as possible, you need to have an indepth knowledge of the following:

COM (and beyond just the IDispatch we get in VFP)
Multithreading
MTS
IIS
ASP
ISAPI
Some SQL Server wouldn't hurt

And in your copious amounts of free time, you need to bone up on the new stuff coming down the pipe that will affect VFP COM servers:

SOAP/ROPE/Web Services
COM+, er, I mean NGWS, uh, that is, .NET

And that's just one area of the product. Could I please have back my old job of developing monolithic apps, please? :-)

The best I can say is, skim the rags and find out what may or may not be useful to your customers. If it useful, learn it on an "as needed" basis. Either that, or specialize if you can get away with it, and hire or contract those that can fill in where you're lacking.

There was once a time when you could know a lot about just about everything. I'm afraid those days are long behind us. I swear, Microsoft alone cranks the stuff out faster than I can learn it.