Good luck, John!

VFP legacy apps, like DOS, will be around for a long time, and will need to be maintained. I will be maintaining them until I retire, in about 5-10 years, or I get laid off. Which ever comes first. Eventually, however, they will be replaced, along with the platform they run on. (This box, at work, now has SuSE 7.3 Pro on it!)

The rapid change in technology has gotta be horrific and scary for kids entering or planning to enter into the field right now. Most developers seem to be betting on MS's market lead, but the new tools, like C#, leave some old VB script writers out in the cold. VFP is MSs toehold in classic client-server technology, but it's not in .NET, nor do developers seem to want them to do so. Not being in their main line could mean a sudden cutoff at any time without affecting their primary income stream. I noticed that in the most recent issue of CODE magazine a large number of artciles used C#, even when talking about VFP. Is there a gentle push to C#? Will C# replace Fox script? XP is hardly out on the shelves and MS is planning to churn the license mill again with its replacement: 'longhorn'.

The only thing for certain is change, and the best approach is not to put all your eggs in one basket. The one thing that has amazed me most since I took Fortan in graduate school in 1968 is how many more languages I have learned since then, and how many of those languages I am no longer using. One language I wish I had picked up in the early 70s was C. But, who can read the crystal ball with perfect clarity?
JLK