>
Really? Well, I felt in good company along with Oracle and others. Most of the problems didn't become apparent until one tried to create "real live" work rather than the usual trivial examples in the books. I'm impressed that with little or no such experience, you still knew that Java was not ready.
>

I did enough research to not make the mistake you made.... ;) That is not to say that all who went to Java made a mistake. For certain types of development, it made sense. For windows apps and db-intensive apps - it did not make sense...

>>>VB had an established track record.
>
>Like dotNET, you mean?

No...like a tool that was on the market for quite some time and had an established track record...

>
You were already advocating dotNET at the pre-release stage, were you not?
>

I was advocating that people explore it and to give it serious consideration. Are you going to say that was bad advice???


>
And dotNET had some infuriating bugs when it first came out, such as the awful debug line-mismatch problem. That was too early as well. Didn't stop you promoting it.
>

Every software tool has its warts...

Given your Java experience - I am not sure you are the correct one to be casting stones...;)



>
Besides, my point was that VB had such deficieicies that it got replaced. I'm assuming you must have seen those deficiencies same as you saw the Java ones? Did you record them anywhere I can review?
>

You think .NET is here because of deficiencies in VB? I think the reasons are a bit more strategic and more complex than that...


>>>And - those that learned VB to one degree or another, had an easier time negotiating the numerous VB-Only samples and translating them to VFP.
>
>And those who learned Java find most C# examples extremely obvious.

Considering the langauge is a secondary concern in .NET - I don't undertand what your real point is. FWIW, C# is anything but rocket science...


>
But did you really find VB samples so difficult before you learned VB? I'm curious- how long did it take you to learn VB? Honestly, this sounds like trying to read German without learning the language, rather than VB which is really fairly easy to follow.
>

From a VFP perspective, VB is/was very different. I probably mastered VB in the span of 6-9 months - and that was back in 1993. But to answer your question - no - VB samples were not that difficult. Nonetheless, knowing and understanding VB made a positive difference.


>>>And of course, those that learned VB had and have an easier time learning .NET.
>
>
What, easier than the 3-day "learn dotNET for VFP developers" courses offered commercially around here?
>

Don't know...haven't seen the details on Kevin's course. Heard good things about it. I am of the opinion that people really do not learn how to program in those courses anyway. The best seem to learn on their own...