>Frankly ... thank God.

God doesn't play favorites. He loves .NET just as much as any other platform :)

>Think about it ... the human body ... over the lifetime of a physician ... evolves very little (even though the knowledge of that body changes significantly ... but the body itself does not). This enables a physician to maintain his or her practice with a reasonable amount of additional training.

The cost of malpractice insurance is driving people out of medical profession. I'll bet a lot these people wish they had taken up programming instead.

>Conversely, and before .NET, programmers were forced to learn new languages periodically in order to remain competitive. With .NET, this (hopefully) is no longer the case. .NET is bringing our profession closer to the medical profession in that the controlling language itself will no longer change much (C# and VB.NET) ... what will change over time is the objects contained in the .NET framework that enable us to communicate with the computer.

IMO, not much has really changed much since the development of OOP. Same principles apply today, just new libraries and data types.

>I like it ... and for the first time in my programming career ... I've seen the benefit of learning a new language ... other than VFP.

There are always benefits to learning new things. Don't ever get complacent, you risk obsoleteing your skills.

Charlie