>Hi John,
>
>As someone who uses both VFP and VB - I was wondering what your opinion is on the learning curve for the average VB programmer? Is it huge?
>

If you approach it from the standpoint of it's a fresh, new language, learning VB.Net will not be a tremendously daunting task; the first exposure to OOP and the CLR environment being the biggest hurdles to overcome. If the VB6 programmer tries to carry what he knows about VB6 along and struggles to make VB.Net behave in the same way, frankly, the newbie is going to have an easier time. It's one of those problems where your experience to date may well harm you.

They face much the same task in learning VB.Net when this community went from FPD/FPW to VFP - we had a lot of fall-out from the community, and a large percentage quit before they made the mental shift. Even today, we have a large segment of our community who, while writing what is nominally VFP, are still struggling along using tools and techniques that are carried as baggage for backwards compatibility. At some point, they're either going to make the shift, or crack under the burden of trying to make a Ferrari drive like a horse and buggy...

There's a lot of grumbling in the VB community from what I saw, and lots of people saying "Well, it'll get a little easier when V2 is available..."

>I have build a few relatively small VB apps in the past year (using Access as the DB) and I've poked around a bit in .NET beta II and it sure looks alot different than VB6...
>
>Al
>
>
>>VFP, like VB 6, will be used for quite some time to come. There will however, be a segment of the VFP developer community that will want to make the transition to .Net. There was a time, not too long ago, when there was talk about how cool it would be if the best of VB and the best of VFP could be combined in some way. I see VS .Net as filling that need. For that reason, I see an opportunity to make contributions that will aid in the transition...
>>