>Time for my $.02. I don't think .NET will crash and burn. Microsoft has way too many people and way too much $ invested for .NET to be anything but One Microsoft Way. There is no fallback, and historically I don't there ever has been a fallback when MS wanted something. Since "something" for MS in this case is a conversion to a future service provider (pat myself on the back when I thought they would go that route when I saw Terminal Server 2 years ago), web services riding on .NET servers are the way to go.

You're probably right that .NET will evenually succeed, I'm by no means directly disagreeing with you, just noting a worst-scenario case. But I've heard enough to be just a teeny bit skeptical about just HOW successful and how QUICKLY it'll occur. If it takes too long, it's in market trouble.

The one slightly indirect, but still critical market element .NET did not anticipate, and IMO this is a potentially very serious factor, is the entire web re-trenching and compression. .NET focuses a lot on the web. But the web movement clearly is not going to move anywhere near as fast as was thought only a year ago. That's where my skepticism hits the pinnacle on .NET, not the technical or theoretical factors - I think it's in a good direction as to these aspects from all I've heard. I think the timing of .NET is bad, mainly, and that was no one's fault, impossible to anticipate.

But if you end up having even only 15-30%, say, of VBers jumping ship, refusing to upgrade on this and perhaps eventually even seeking other tools that meet their (mainly non-web) needs better, just that small fraction could cause serious trouble for .NET.

>I have to say I don't like the fact that VFP7 won't be in the box. At my current shop I can always say to people "use this for the data manipulation object in this tier instead of VB/ADO" and if/when they give me a hard time I could always say "it's in the Visual Studio box, just install VFP and check my .prg out of VSS". Now what do I say?

I don't know if you saw my post to Robert Green on this, but at my agency VS has not helped gain vfp users, AFAIK. Being part of VS has improved *respect* for vfp, but that's it. I personally have brought on board a few new vfp people, but it wasn't through VS at all. It was purely through my spiel explaining the benefits of vfp, what kind of tool it's good at, and demo-ing solid, fast, data-centric applications built with vfp. This last is the real selling point.

>Hey, wait a minute. VSS isn't in the .NET box either.....

Hey, you're right :-)