George1111,

As a professional developer, I have to strongly disagree with most of your post.

Of the 25+ enterprise level projects (in the 1-3 million lines of code range) that I have been directly involved with, over 90% saw immediate benefits moving to the .NET platform. And this experience correlates well with the experiences of other people (also professional developers) that I know.

The ones that ran into trouble invariably attempted to keep "old ideas" and not embrace a new design methodology.

The fact is that developing a .Net solution requires as big (and possibly bigger) mental paradigm (mindset) change as the switch from "structured" programming to "object-oriented" programming required.

This change encompasses everything down to what items should be memver variables of a class, and what should be dynamically created or passed as parameters.

Even today, I see people making critical mistakes at the very initial phases of architecture and implementation.

As far as "what has happened to companies", I have not seen any documentation that shows a statistical difference in the number of profitable companies vs. bankruptcies (or even decreased earnings) that has been attirbutd to .NET.

(And yes, I have been running my own firm since 1984. OVer the past 5 years approximately 80% of my income derives from .NET solutions. My "bug rates" have decreased by 40%, and my average development budget (even with inflation) is down by more than 1/3 specifically because of this change in technology.