.NET Career Movement

I've been working with getting familiar with the buzz I've heard on .NET for the last year or so now. I'd actually picked up Visual Studio 2005 and a copy of Learning C# to get familiar with what I'd heard about the language built on the shoulders of C++ and JAVA just for the sake of my continued computer dork knowledge. Then my employer decides to discontinue any future development and move on to other forms of business. I have to find a job and much to my suprise if I want to stay in the Baton Rouge area for work it's almost all .NET based. I hadn't job hunted in the past because I was happy with my job but apparently nobody around here is doing any serious development on any other platform but .NET.

Getting Friendly With C# and .NET

I've decided that my career is definitely going to go with .NET development. It's what people want to do and I remember I loved working with Visual Studio 6 in college and in some stats applications we used back at InsiderLabs. I've increased my .NET book collection to 5 books on ASP.NET, ADO.NET and C#.NET in order to have maximum resources as I get up to professional standards with this environment.(Nothing new to me since my career at InsiderLabs involved a simple "we need to do this now so learn this" approach to everything.) I'm working on a Databased Windows application and a Databased Website to get a grip on total concepts and I've got to say that thus far it's far more fun than development with PHP and PERL.

Getting Over The Hump

The strange thing about programming in Visual Studio and with .NET is the languages aren't the tedious part; getting adapted to the Framework is. This week is the first week I feel really good about my handle on the knowledge. It took me about 2 weeks of solid reading, trials and testing to get there and that is quite a long time for me! I imagine it's probably quite daunting to these poor college kids when they first have it in front of them.