>>Some replies will tell that it's good to add another tool to your toolkit when in fact this argument is bogus.
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>As a profossional developer, it is *always* a good idea to put another tool in your toolkit.

Tool - yes. Language - not necessarily, unless we are talking about something generic like Structured Query Language.

I have found that attempting to master VB 6 and VB.Net has diluted my VFP skills and severely limited the amount of time I have for picking up (for example) the new VFP 9 functionality. And let’s face it picking up a new language in 2004 is a far cry from the same thing a couple of decades ago. These days we have Form designers, best practices, frameworks, etc. to add to the burden.

Take for example Web Forms where many controls are available from either the Web Controls or the HTML Controls toolbox. I have yet to find any authoritative source that explains why Microsoft felt compelled to have two options – the cynic in me says “more rope to hang yourself with”. And the path to discovering the differences is an arduous one. Let’s look at a couple of examples:

Web Form Button – defaults to a Submit button and I’ve yet to find a way to change them to a regular Input button. Why was this as issue? I have a form where the User enters a number in a field and pressing tab fires the Post Back, causing the record to be retrieved and displayed. Alas if the User presses enter instead of tab – that causes the Save button (by really bad coincidence) to also Post Back. This nasty bug caused the yet to be retrieved row to be overwritten by empty values. This was solved by switching from a Web Form button to an HTML Input Button.

Labels – The HTML label can be right justified, but the Web Form label cannot. What’s up with that?

It may be that some guru knows of better ways to deal with those types of issue – though that is not my point. A competent developer should be able to use a tool / language after a few months of learning without having a more or less constant need to rely on third party sources of information like the Internet.

In my opinion less than one in ten developers is up to the task of mastering more than one language concurrently.