Interesting observations Jim. Thank you for your input. I have read several books on .NET, and one claimed there were 2000 classes and another claimed over 4000. Regardless of the actual number there is a lot to learn.

Which classes work and which ones do not? Which class is best for a specific reason or implementation? Are all the classes necessary? Why so many? Another article stated some of the classes and concepts did not work. The ship date for Visual Studio 8.0 was said to be December 2003 in yet another article.

People have been talking about the third party market for .NET. That could add thousands of additional classes and objects for us to consider. This is going to be an interesting ride. Fasten your seat belts everyone!

Tom




>After lots of listening, my **first** foray into .NET is through ASP.NET. Of course it has to go into some detail about the .NET framework in order to teach me.
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>While I have little doubt that .NET will one day succeed, my initial gut reaction is that it will have one hell of an uphill climb before it gets there.
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>I look back at VFP's implementation of OOP. It had some 15 classes and a handful of new concepts. Most developers admitted, by the time that VFP6 rolled around, that their initial implementations of OOP with VFP was significantly off the mark compared to what experience and further discussion had taught them.
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>I look back at VFP's implementation of OOP and realize that it was accomplished by a small group of developers at MS. Yet even then there were a few things that required 'adjustment' in VFP5 and even in VFP6.
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>.NET has, literally, thousands and thousands of classes. And these classes have extensibility well beyond what VFP offers in its own classes. Obviously all these classes were written by thousands of developers, likely in several organizational groups.
>There has to be redundancy. There have to be interaction errors. There have to be documentation errors (though maybe not - the book relies on the .NET class browser and maybe .NET itself does too to DOCUMENT them all) or at least absent documentation (that adequately describes each class/property/method).
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>SInce it took at least 2 years for the majority of VFP hotshots to "get" OOP properly in VFP, it seems to me that it's gotta take well longer than that for .NET class usage/application to reach similar levels.
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>I truly don't see an advantage to getting into .NET in any significant way now because I sense that a WHOLE LOT of guru experimentation/analysis is going to be needed to determine what really matters and what really costs what and for .NET to be 'distilled' to usefulness for the average Joe programmer.
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>I plan to finish the ASP book and then to go back to watching from the sidelines.