So, I joined a .NET user group, I installed VS, I started learning.
Problem was, MS was churning out the "next great thing" faster than I could learn the last great thing. While I was getting my head around WinForms, WPF came out. I started using WPF, then Silverlight arrived, which was like WPF, just a subset of it, and therefore different enough to be problematic.
But that wasn't too bad. 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.
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.
I still do love F# though.
In hindsight, the thing that strikes me about .NET development is that most businesses using it really want the whole stack to be from one provider whom they trust - and as a result, third party alternatives never really get a look-in if an MS or MS blessed technology such as JSON.net (http://james.newtonking.com/json) can do the same job.
That is a massive sweeping generalisation of course, and only applicable to the limits of my experience in a small city in a small country.