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>Don't get me wrong, I think VFP is a great tool. I think it addresses classes of applications that .Net was not designed for. The fact is, MS is trying to be an enterprise company, not a line of business company. Products like VB and VFP, out of the box, are not enterprise development tools. In order to develop enterprise apps, you need the addition of developers who are at an expert level. The idea behind .Net is to balance out the equation. i.e., reduce the level of developer you need by improving the tool. Will it work? I don't know. Time will tell... I do know this...if one considers himself a MS developer, one better become acquainted with the enterprise market; since that is the strategic focus of the company.


If that's MS's goal I think they failed miserably...

.Net requires a higher level caliber of developer than the current tools require. Yes, more is handled for you, but the entire architecture of the platform is much more complex and requires more code. If you're building distributed applications you need to know how it works - I don't care if you click on a button that says Add Web Reference - that saves me all of two lines of code in say VFP. But if it doesn't work then what??? In order to troubleshoot that problem you need to know that there's a proxy object that talks to the Web Service on the server via SOAP packaging up the messages.
Think about the guy who doesn't know what to do when he tries to add the Web reference at the development site and tries to explain that to the person in charge...

I don't think things have gotten easier. IMHO, .Net's focus is on architecture and in that MS has done an excellent job. Implementation wise I think the CLR is way more complex than it needs to be. Flexible sure, but the complexity is a major hurdle to entry. One of the reason VB has been so popular even despite all of the hype of Java over the last few years, is because it wasn't Java! It's easier to work with. Most Java developers come from a C++ background which means these developers have a totally different outlook on how to write code. Java has a totally different mindset from the object based environment that VB spawned and VB now has inherited a Java language architecture by way of the CLR. Any .Net language will have this same issue.

This doesn't mean a decent developer can't make the transition or that a newbie can't learn it, but it isn't going to be any easier than it is with today's released tools. There's a lot of stuff that's downright scary in how it all ties together and controls every aspect of the OS. Break any of that (say the FrontPage extensions) and much of the dev environment goes down with it (try developing a Web or Web Service project without FP extensions and see how far you get <g>)...

Not sure if that's progress or not...