Hi Tom,

>I hope you do not mind the intrusion. Oh well, on an Internet forum such things happen all the time.

You're welcome...

>We all have our motivations and rationalizations to describe the things we do and why. As for myself I look at the market in Silicon Valley where I live and respond to it. There are very few opportunities to earn a living in my area maintaining or creating data based applications using tools that are of a previous version or in some cases dependant upon a particular language that the developer likes but the client or employer does not. It costs a lot to live or exist in this area so we have to “go with the flow” that is have a skill set that meets the requirements of available employment.

I realize that you might be in a total other situation I'm in. However, even you can't affort to jump on the very first train. You're constantly looking where the opportunities are and have to make the right decissions when you encounter a sitiation where you cannot earn a living anymore with your available skills.

However if you closely read my post, your situation does not contradict with what I'm saying. You don't need to be on first wave off the hype. Only when your current business tends to dry up, you'll need to look further. The difference between your situation and my is that the changes you see tend to be more frequent. In my situation I have the comfort I can safely sit back and watch the global lines and draw my conclusions. IOW we can both say: "We'll cross the brigde if we come to it". In your situation though you seem to have to cross a lot off bridges more than i do.

I'd suspect, that you've read quite a bit of .NET and probably know more about it than I do. However, you still have to sit and wait for job opportunities for .NET applications.

>Everyone has a different set of circumstances and viewpoint on any given topic. The above are mine concerning this subject. They may not be complete but hopefully give an insight to another viewpoint.

I realize that in esspecially silicon valley your situation is quite different than a lot of other parts of the world (and remember that the USA represents only a fraction of the worlds citizens). If I look at my situation here in Holland I see a total other picture. There is not much talent up here and I always seem to find another VFP project. Salary is quite good: I can make an excellent living out of it. I work mainly at home, sometimes at a clients site. I develop some standard software I sell to the government.

I mostly spend my time to improve the quality of my work, by for example integrating more features into my personal framework. The emphasis lies on making things better and faster rather than jumping on each hype. This also requires a lot of investments in terms of learning new things. Now I've managed to integrate CR 8.5 into my framework with a lot of flexibility (e.g. changing report groupings and sorting at runtime in the preview). I'm constantly make new modules to extend the framework. This would impossible if I change development platform for the very first hype that arives. The investment in xBase code is simply too huge to affort such a step.

Personally this would mean that I'll only leave the VFP shop until the advantages of moving are greater than losing the huge investment in code (and experience).

You and I seem to be in different worlds. However, I cannot say what percentage of the VFP community are closer to my world or closer to your world. That said anyone should determine for themself what is the most wise thing to do, and not going to blindly follow the yelling guru that they should migrate (though Microsoft would love to see this). There is much to lose if you make the wrong decision.

Walter,