Unfortunately your scenario is not uncommon at all. I've seen a lot of this recently and frankly this is the worst kind of FUDD you can throw at a development situation.

I think that for certain types of applications (e-Commerce, Web backends) .NET will make a good platform once it ships and once it proves stable. However, I'm very doubtful of the Windows Form engine being fast enough and usable enough in its first incarnation. It's a clunker in its current state. That entire architecture is based on the VB form designer based on what ca. 1990 technology <s>... I'm sure that won't stop the VB crowd, he he...

Seriously though, .Net has lots of potential, but as Nancy said, it's a big change and the changes required basically require new development regardless from what platform you are coming. It also means a huge learning curve at whoever will take on that project. And you're right to question whether the developer is trying to finance his learning time off of your project - but that'll become a fact of life for many .NET projects in the near future at least.

COM will not die anytime soon. I suspect a very large number of developers will not make the switch to .NET due to the complexity. COM works well in many situations and many applications don't even need COM especially desktop apps. I can guarantee you that desktop apps will run faster using VFP or VB6 than they will uinder .NET at least in this first rev of .Net.

Web apps also have other choices. The reality is that COM of all things to pin to current technology is probably the best example of what's wrong with today's software. But that doesn't mean the tools that use it (VB, VFP etc) are bad - it just means COM has problems and you either don't have to use them or use them in limited capacities that are known to work well.

COM underlies alot of Windwos and will continue to do so in the future regardless of .NET. But whereas COM has been made easier with VB/VFP and other high level languages, I htink COM will slide back into the operating system layer at the C++ level... At the same time that means that anything that uses COM today (VFP/VB6) will continue to work into the future and you don't have to worry about that not working all of a sudden. The question becomes to a degree what features to you need and do you really need .NET and what it provides right now?

I would encourage anybody who starts a new developemnt project today to look at .NET and decide whether the features are worth the learning curve and doing a project on the bleeding edge without much documentation and 'best practices' experience around. There's lots of great stuff in .NET, but it will take time to assimilate the different way that things work. Sort of the Java way, vs. the Windows API way of programming <s>....

+++ Rick ---