CMPerez wrote:

My advice is that first and foremost, train yourself in OOP thinking. Learn patterns, and apply them.

Pretty sure, that hits the nail on the head. Now I just need to figure out how to go about learning to think like that.

I very much would like to stay in the Desktop LOB field. It is what I know and understand, in so much as I am good at taking a vague idea from a client and turning it into a stable piece of software that does what they want, or at I was. I love working with SQL Server and could prob make my living as a DB Admin, but I want to get back to creating. Anyway, thanks for the advice and answers so far. I am going to be looking into the books and training links provided so far. I am kinda wondering if maybe I am overthinking this. Is C#, WPF, a DAL and SQL Server a valid collection of, and I am not sure of the term here, technologies/tools/platforms/frameworks to create a modern desktop application? Is that not leaving to many of the buzzwords I read every day, and mostly don't understand, on the table? Also, I found the comment to stay away from EF very interesting. I created my own DAL, and wrote a program to generate the code for me from the database schema, in 1998. I have used it in every data accessing program I have created since that time. I would love to update it again and continue to use it, because I know it works. Do modern programmers do that? How important, I wonder, is knowing EF to finding a job in this day and age?

Hello All, I started writing code in the late 90s using VB4. In 2000 I took VB6, SQL Server and a pretty good skill set to a previously DOS and flat file only company as their first Windows Programmer. What happened from there was both classic and stupid. I got comfortable and felt safe. We pumped out a lot of programs fast and dirty and updated, upgraded and converted a lot of customers. I was mostly a 1 man programming department trying to keep up with competitors who had full staffs. I quit developing new stuff, except for a few new features a year, and mostly did maintenance. As a company we kept putting of the "rewrite to new tech" in order to modify our existing software to work for that newest customer. It really became a cycle where I fell farther and farther behind the leading edge of our industry while I tried to keep the existing product modern enough to keep management and sales happy. In 2014 I took a big gamble and forced a stop to the cycle while I tried to catch up with tech and start development of a core product line that had a future. It cost me my job. Sorry for the book, but I wanted to tell everyone that so you understand that, when I ask you this: I am an application programmer at heart, and while I am behind the current tech, I am very good at what I do. I just can't seem to find the right resource or approach to finding my way back to the front of our field. There seems to be no clear starting point in the current jumble of interwoven platforms, libraries, methodologies, languages and what not. I tried moving to VB.NET and the first code review I asked for I was told that I was writing very good VB6 code in VB.NET. They were right, that was what it was. I think I want to move to C#, if for no other reason than to help break old habits. Can someone point me in the right direction? How do I get moving again? Thanks. Rem