>It took COM about as long to mature.

It took that long to mature and now we hear more and more that COM is dead. Where will .Net really be in 5 years?

> I don't think it means you cannot be productive with .NET today. The downside is that there is not a path that is blazed for you yet. And if you are somebody who needs that, then limiting yourself to the academic side of .NET may not be a bad idea. Still, taking the time to get acquainted and learn will be money well spent. I am seeing too many positive things with .NET to not believe it will succeed. The fact that MS is investing 5.2 Billion on research and that .NET is the focal point says to me that this will work and will work well.

You're absolutely right when you say that we should learn .Net but there is a price to pay for that learning. How many developers got in to the Java version of MS bandwagon because not only was it Java but a big plus it was made by MS. How could it go bad!

So will it be the same for .Net but on a much bigger scale.

>As we speak, I am writing a contact management system for some bank sales reps in VB .NET. Pretty darn productive and am not missing a beat when compared to either VB 6 or VFP...

The big question here is what do you really gain by doing it with .Net? You probably could've make it with VB6 or VFP. Were you able to sell it based mostly on your reputation or really because it's .Net?

Now comes another risk. The product is not so good but MS decides to push it really hard. So they get their enormous marketing machine to do so. As part of that marketing plan they pay some high-visibility experienced developers to not only learn it but tell as many persons they can that this is the thing. Without learning .Net there's no hope for the human race. MS knows that this will have an impact. And we can't bitch on MS for that because those persons don't work (officially) for MS.

It's a win-win situation if the plan works. The developers that got paid to learn it (and promote it) will be on top of the game when the product gets to be a success and MS will finally make those big bucks because every developer will want to use that money making developing suite.

What if it does'nt work. Then the paid developers will go on with what they used before and don't really care because they were well paid for the work they did. The losers will be once again those that believed and got on it too fast without waiting for proofs to see that the product was not so great after all.