>Many MFC developers vastly preferred the old IDE, and are sticking with
VC6 for
that reason.
Because they grew up with it and learning the new stuff is scary and it
appears you would lose a lot of time doing the transition;
But the people that finally set the step towards the .NET way of doing
rarely want to go back to the dinosaur thing called MFC.
But since VB 6 and VC++ 6 are not available to buy anymore, people are
forced to jump to the .NET way of doing and now less and less people are
using the old way of doing things, except for the hardcore ones. I believe
that from job-security viewpoint, it is very interesting to start learning
..NET technology. Use VC++ 2005 so this way you can still create old style
programs and the .NET way or a mix of both. It will probably take a few
more years before .NET is standard programming accepted by all programmers,
but you need a lot of time to learn the way of the .NET programming,
especially the security related stuff that every programmer should know
about. We are in the age of secure programming and .NET is a good step into
that direction.