Kevin,

>- If you've determined that you can create a VFP app in 3 days, your first stab at a .NET version will take longer than 3 days. (Think back to when you built your first VFP app - you become more productive as you learned more).
>- Your initial efforts into .NET are much more about building your knowledge base. If you're successful, subsequent efforts should take less time....

I agree with your comments here and appreciate very much the details you included for the benefit of anyone wanting to learn .NET. My experience has been that learning my way around in .NET has meant lots of experimenting, reading, studying other peoples' code, and building a few simple test forms for internal use (like a little one-screen app to select a directory and create thumbnail images for each image found there) before attempting anything more ambitious.

Thinking of the learning curve as a multi-month adventure is much more realistic, with productivity coming later after you have spent those multiple hour-long "how in the world do you do this" moments.

For example, on the ASP.NET app calling the VFP COM object that I referred to in another message, I went round and round trying to get an XMLTextWriter to output to a string, until I finally understood that a string as the first parameter on instantiation always indicates a filename and you must provide a StringWriter instead.

That's the kind of stuff that will make a 3-day VFP project take weeks or months as a first .NET project. :-)

Of course, after wrestling out the StringWriter issue, it was easy to understand the concept that I should use a StringReader to gobble up my XML String returned from the VFP COM object to pass it into the DataSet.ReadXML method.

Also, I have noticed that as in VFP, there are many different ways to approach the same task in .NET, including in some cases over a dozen overloads in method signatures to accommodate just about any scenario you can imagine. Figuring out best practices and which of those choices are most efficient is another layer of knowledge that must be accumulated.

It's all those layers of accumulated knowledge of concepts, .NET classes and syntax that are necessary to become somewhat productive, and I think they are best learned just as you have described in your excellent post, which is now in my folder of favorites.