>This is one of the reasons why I qualified the point.

Where? I see nothing to the effect that "This is an irreleveant fact but..."

>I don't agree that every body is a "rookie" per se. I believe expert level developers, the truly good ones, will be able to leverage the technology quickly. Certainly faster than the 4-5 year time frame you give. I would say within 2 years, .NET will be quite pervasive in the marketplace.

Very lovely. Unfortunately, I've got problems today. Fox has been around for 15+ years, is stable, and I can find developers. I can't wait 2 years until .NET matures to find good developers for the problems I have today.

>It may very well be that for the business to solve the challenges it has identified in order to achieve its goals, new hardware may be in order.

You missed my point. The list of differences goes on for a long time, and ... ok, lets put it like this.

John, I need you to change the textbox on my Windows form so that it ignores any dashes when inputted, adds its own dashes at positions 3 and 9, and inputs all the characters as capital letters. How much will it cost you and when will it be done?

Go.

VB6 and VFP could have finished by the time I was done with this post. We'd also have faith that this is a well tested solution, being as we've done it with VFP7 and VB6 for years.

I'm curious to how you woudl solve this problem in .NET and if it would take more than an hour.