>Having said all of that, I believe that VFP developers would probably have an easier time (which I think counts for something) with VB as opposed to C#. Doe

I don't agree.

I think VB is actually much harder to deal with coming from VFP than coming in from scratch because of the minor differences in syntax.

Let me start by saying it up front: I *HATE* VB and always have. It's a very unclean and haphazard language. But then again in a lot of ways so is VFP. Both are inconsistent languages but at least in VFP much of the haphazard language design is at least useful for reducing the amount of code that needs to be written.

What always bothered me about VB is that it wants so bad to be a 'grown up' language but then it's always flaunted all existing syntax standards used by just about every other language. And it does so even now in the face of .NET again with beautiful things like the me. operator, mybase. and the use of ever so overloaded dot (.) notation...

C# is not C++ and in fact is a very stripped down language, which is good in light of the CLR. You can read the complete language reference in a couple of hours. There aren't a million choices about which construct to use for looping. Or for string parsing, because C# relies on the CLR for that. Yes you can do the same in VB, but from a learning perspective you're looking at a function reference or even examples that might use several different ways to do the same thing.

I agree with Kevin, if you're gonna relearn things completely take the opportunity and learn a new language with it and with C# you get the advantage of learning something that'll be reusable elsewhere - (C++, Java, JScript) - which pretty much covers all language levels - low level/system, application and script - in one swoop. The only one out of that batch that might not be so important is Java... but I personally use C++ and JScript daily.

In the end it's still a matter of preferrence... but whenever I do training or sessions I use C# and won't go through the effort to show both C# and VB. I find that highly annoying in articles and books in fact. When buying a book I'll make sure that the authors more or less stick to one language - hopefully limited to special occasions where the langauges are different (interop and unmangaged code mainly). If you're a .NET developer and you can't translate between the two you're probably not working on the right platform <g>...


+++ Rick ---