The VS .NET stuff is so productive, just buy it and two or three of the MSPress books, and you'll be up and running in a month. It is now supereasy to do remote objects. The IDE creates proxy objects for you from the WSDL interface description, and all the .NET languages garbage collect, so you just instantiate interface objects and call the methods. And all the multithreading and thread-cacheing stuff is also transparent now. So what used to be a giant pain is five pages of code.
I've never done database-centric systems, but AFAIK VFP is still client/server, and .NET is inherently 3-tier and Web UI. If database apps are your thang, you gotta do it.
thanks, that sounds like a very good plan.