Hank,

Just to be clear: I personally have no issue with paying MS for the IDE, though I understand why it might matter to others.

Re 3rd party IDEs: a few years ago my company got all geared up using an early Java one called Supercede. When it vanished suddenly, we were left with an orphan- exactly what we were promised we would avoid by moving to Java.

The above "anecdote" is merely to show another side of the equation, not to argue against 3rd party IDEs, though MS itself has a few words to say about that sort of open source stuf ;-)

Re C#: I'm fairly sure I deployed work using C# a lot earlier than many/most of the current prophets. I now have the dubious privilege of being one of the first to shelve a successful dotNET development as well- being redone as ordinary COM to assist interfacing to fat client UI from other vendors who show no signs of releasing dotNET versions. Probably to be done using VB, unless we decide to do some local data-munging in which case VFP.

So: with my legacy of "early adoption", I'm suggesting that people "make haste slowly". IMHO, people who are successful and productive can afford to wait. More of those IDEs will appear, better VFP-style "frameworks" will be released and much of the current complexity that is not required for a standard database app, will be moved back under the covers. Oh, and either a 3rd-party or a dedicated MS local database repository will teach millions of developers the benefits of such an innovative idea. At which point I think you'll see far greater acceptance in forums like this- assuming that proper voice interfaces do not burst upon us first and turn the whole PC-oriented development model on its head ;-)