I would recommend to start looking into contributing to open source projects. This is already big enough to notice and become even more mainstream in future. IM

I would recommend to start looking into contributing to open source projects. This is already big enough to notice and become even more mainstream in future. IMHO. But, of course, it is not absolute truth. If you want to land .NET job at some big consultancy firm - they probably will not care about open source work anyway.