[Nick Danger]

"Object Oriented" doesn't magically obliterate spaghetti code, after all... your new object oriented software project is going to be more kludgy than whatever it was that your team was writing prior to their jump into OO.

There's truth in that... people who are used to writing spaghetti code will write more of it after they learn how to define a class. But I think one of the issues on the table here is whether Microsoft made a conscious decision to leave some of the dumber ones behind when moving to .NET. If you've ever put an ad in the paper for a VB programmer, you know what kind of crap is out there. There are former shoe salesmen with IQ's of 55 writing VB. The scientists probably have a chimp that can do it.

[Southack]

"Microsoft made a conscious decision to leave some of the dumber ones behind when moving to .NET."

What's this?! A stealth argument for making development environments *more* difficult?!

Honestly, throwing together an app in VB.Net is not more difficult than VB 6...packaging the "executable" to be shipped is actually easier in VB.Net.

What MicroSoft did was roll out an original Object-Oriented system in VB.Net that pretended to be an incremental upgrade from VB 6; when the reality was that VB 6 was the last of the line and VB.Net was an entirely different language that shared little more than the old name (a crappy way to trade on past marketshare).

[sevry]

whether Microsoft made a conscious decision to leave some of the dumber ones behind when moving to .NET.

Microsoft can refer to its customers however they like. If you think Microsoft sees a portion of its customer base as the "dumber ones", then those people might decide they no longer need Microsoft. You'll find a lot of software development is not done on NT-line systems, but rather some UNIX clone. That's a conscious decision by various firms. Microsoft, if .NET proves to be as incapable and unreliable as some suggest, and if they are forcing this as the one and only development platform, could well be on the way to losing a huge market share as their capitalization plummets. But the time line would be anyone's guess. People thought Apple would perish under Sculley. But because of huge cash reserves, Apple held on FOR YEARS, until Jobs returned to rescue the firm.

[Abcdefg]

Nick, I am one of the dumber ones and I can learn C#. Or rather small parts of C# and smaller parts of the .NET framework. I bet it is even easier than VB, if you start out with it.