>If someone wants to change profession and get a job as a programmer within next 6-12 months, what should he study? Should he study VFP/VB/MSSQL now and work his way up to .NET or should he go straight to .NET (although still in early beta but functional and stable) and MSSQL?

Well, after taking a look at whats here, I would pickup Java. I think once you have your head around Java and made some dough with it, we may find out that .NET is actually gonna be huge, and you should have a very easy transition to C# from Java, and if you don't go to .NET you'd still have your Java.