> Back in the heyday of a few years ago there would have been at least 4 full pages. BTW, there were no ads for VB.NET, C# or .NET.<

To be fair, newspaper ads aren't a good way to judge popularity. Today, newspaper ads for IT jobs are for simple duties, usually maintaining an existing app, if that. Neither VFP nor .NET developement are simple duties.

>The economy has contracted significantly. As a result I do agree that it will take a bit longer for .NET to become a dominant force for non ASP.NET related applications.<

I'd say that the US economy has stagnated but the IT sector has imploded. While the IT sector is in free fall, MSFT comes out with proprietary products like WinXP and .NET. Saleswise, WinXP is a major bomb. Since in my mind, .NET is a secondary product to new OSes, it's a bigger bomb (to date) as well.

Side note: If I remember correctly, in the last DevCon keynote Calvin was stating something to the effect that with 10 million XP licenses sold to date (now roughly 19 million), WinXP is the fastest selling OS in history. There's nothing factually incorrect with that statement but it is extremely, extremely misleading. If you're buying a new computer with Windows 2000, you're buying a WinXP license. If you buy some MSDN versions, I believe you're buying an WinXP license. Companies are buying dozens, if not hundreds, of WinXP licenses and not using a single one on the desktop. On the desktop is where it's at and WinXP isn't there.

Bill Anderson