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I tend to agree with these points. Microsoft is in the business of scaring people into new technology. "If you don't do it now it'll be too late." It's always been like that - just look at any MS demo that's showing the coolest, quick features that you'll never use in any application because they're too simplistic <g>...

I've said this in many places - I think .NET is solid architecture (system wise). I'm not so sure about implementation (class design and level of abstraction), which IMHO, is the main reason it's so relatively hard to pick up and start working with .NET. This will kill a lot of developers trying and throw projects budgeted under traditional rules off track. You can bet there's going to issues along these lines.

As to stability and implementation etc. I think this is what I'm waiting for myself. Hear about the deployment nightmares (especially once the CLR revs) and even better the issues of setting up security for desktop apps. There's been very little talk abou these issues partly because the issues are very complex and partly because nobody's really done it.

OTOH, I've done some load testing with much of the stuff I've built and what I see personally in my limited code that I've written works well and reliably. Stability of .NET so far has not been an issue in my work. Credit due where credit is due.

I think you raise a very good point and that is, jumping in now will waste a lot more time on part of the developer than it will say in a year from now when there are decent books and best-practices approaches available. For me, when I write .NET articles I focus on specific technologies in detail, techologies that I have time to research long enough to find both the good and the bad, and the work-arounds (of which there are contrary to many people's idealistic view of .NET). Unfortunately a large number of .NET articles are too superficial these days to ever get to the required level of detail to really understand the various issues. .NET has so many different ways of doing things and it's going to take a long time for best practices guidelines to get established I think...

Would I build a mission critical .NET application today? For desktop: definitely not. For the Web using ASP.NET - possibly. Would I feel 100% confident that I could pull it off techology wise (as I would be with VFP)? Nope - not at this time. I can't know. But then how long did it take you or me to feel that way about VFP??? 10 years? <g>