If you're looking for a solution that can also hit a Windows 2010 (when it comes out and if it is still relevant) base, I'd suggest something like J2EE with a GUI frontended by IBMs SWT.
For an example of SWT download Eclipse from eclipse.org. It is a free Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports lots of languages including Java, C, C++, COBOL. Eclipse has to some degree eclipsed(barr) a lot of other IDEs in the Java world. It also works great on Windows if you need that.
I write GUI apps using SWT as it uses native widgets underneath a set of easy to use java class wrapper. This means the user's GUI performance is excellent. It also means you can back-end it with clustering and failover J2EE solutions from the FOSS jboss group (www.jboss.org) (they had 2Mill downloads of their app server last 12 months) and your favourite Postgres or MySQL database. If you also need to deploy web (usually Apache Struts is best) to the same customer base, you can shared all those great business rules you wrote in as Enterprise beans between the Web client and the GUI Client. The same rules can be re-used if your base is buzzword compliant and demands web services et al.
As far as anything to do with .NET bindings to FOSS, that will probably end up a bigger can of worms than SCO. I can almost here big Bill in Seattle in the background "Mwah, hwa, hwa" (little finger on side of cheek)
HTH
Stu
Mark Pearson wrote:
Have a look at wxWindows http://www.wxwindows.org It is a cross-platform free gui development toolkit written in c++ vith bindings for python and perl.
I only discovered it recently but it has been around about 10 years and seems very powerful.
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