It was the 'blessed' data layer stuff that threw me. When I started it was DataSets etc. Then it was LINQ-to-SQL, then it was very much not LINQ-to-SQL, but ins

It was the 'blessed' data layer stuff that threw me. When I started it was DataSets etc. Then it was LINQ-to-SQL, then it was very much not LINQ-to-SQL, but instead was Entity Framework. As a newbie who was trying to make myself marketable, it felt like a bit of a hamster wheel, but then through the user group, I met .NET pros who felt exactly the same way. Most .NET developers learn what they need to know for the project at hand. A year ago, I worked on a fairly cutting-edge EF Code-First n-tier project, with knockout.js on the front end, using ASP.NET MVC web API. I am currently extending a crufty ASP.NET 2.0 webforms app. Adaptability is an important skill for developers. Also, each iteration of the Microsoft data access stack feels like an improvement over the earlier ones, so it's not an unbearable burden to learn it. And at the end of the day, the greatest irony was that when I finally broke into the market, it was a Java-based developer role on the basis of my JavaScript. So all my years of frantically spinning the .NET wheel was for naught. Hiring someone for a Java job, based on their JavaScript knowledge is fairly unconventional (to put it politely). Are you certain that the general programming knowledge you acquired through "spinning the wheel" wasn't a factor?