Charlie

The writing is *not* on the wall. There is no established principle of fact that CLR is "the future" or "the only way" that not being part of it will equate to a failure.

This is starting to sound like "certain other forums" where there is only one way and it is the way that the god-vendor has decreed and if you deviate you can expect to go broke and be ridiculed.

It wasn't that long ago that Java was going to sweep the world. It has in some places and some ways, but a lot of that was hype. I am particularly competent to comment because I "fell for it" and shifted my whole company to Java. It was a terrible, terrible mistake- yes we *could* do it all in java but it was slower and I had to carry the burden of training in all the "cool" new evolving features for my programmers who had a lovely time.

My advice: STAY PRODUCTIVE. If you have a good living in VFP, there is no point going around hunched in case the sky falls. If the work is diminishing for you: you need new skills.

Point # 2: CLR will be pretty new- I mean "new" as it usually means with a MS product. Those who want to use it have a steep learning curve ahead of them, grappling with cool new functions that almost work. Do you want to be one of the first? Maybe you need to do that because boasting about such "firsts" is an important way for you to differentiate yourself. If so, fine. But there are also lots and lots of people out there whose relationship with clients and/or products are so strong that they do not need such claims to support themselves.

Will all VB shops jump straight to CLR? I suspect not. I believe there are still lots of Win95/Win98 machines out there. Their humans are still "customers" for somebody. So going to CLR is not a "now or never" thing.

*If* you decide you need the CLR you will be no worse off making the decision to go with it *later* at the same time as all those others grappling with it.

In the corporate arena: IMHO the fight has shifted off the workstation anyway. The big issue for CLR on the server will be PERFORMANCE imho. But we'll have to wait and see.

It really worries me seeing people making sweeping "time to move" statements. I'm sure it is time to move for some people. It always is. Same as it was a good idea for some people to move to Java when I did. But there are lots of circumstances and positions out there. we all need to qualify ourselves in terms of our own position so we don't push others to do something silly.

Regards

JR