Jess,

There is life beyond VFP and ".NET".

After 10 years of FoxPro, I now find myself developing multi-threading application servers in Mercant (formerly Micro-focus) COBOL under UNIX (AIX), communicating with other application servers using IBM's MQSeries messaging services, referencing multiple Sybase and Oracle database servers via imbedded SQL, pushing information to numerous Remote Intelligent Terminals across North America, and interacting with a Visual Basic presentation layer (formerly SmallTalk) under Windows 2000 Pro that talks to the application layer via TopEnd transaction processing middleware.

No VFP, no .NET. I've been at it for just over a month ... VFP, and Microsoft in general, now seem light years away. And the money is better. Maintain a can-do attitude, and they (the recruiters / interviewers) won't even penalize you for having used VFP.

(There is no longer a "standard toolkit" ... It's attitude that sells).

All the best,

Gerry.