> Any particular user groups that you would recommend? Come to MXUG next week: https://groups.google.com/group/mxug?hl=en&pli=1
There is also datamelb tonight: http://groups.google.com/group/datamelb As for getting started; it's obvious, but just find something you want to do, and try and do it. Most of "what I want to do" can be done in the form of a website, hence I'm doing various things in the ASP.NET MVC framework, which I would recommend. For Windows apps yes, WPF is of interest, but I wouldn't personally dedicate much time to Silverlight (but I'm biased, as I'm headed out of programming anyway, some people find it fruitful). Like others, I can highly recommend participation in online forums/mailing lists for the purposes of learning. StackOverflow is "good", but not great, in my humble opinion. But it is the better out of all the forum options. I tend to prefer lists as they allow deeper discussion. It's kind of a good time to get into .NET as there are a variety of changes in the framework that means you'll kind of be on even footing with other guys (LINQ is relatively new, etc, etc) so you can feel reasonable confident that even the longer-term programmers aren't experts in that yet, and there is still plenty of ground to discover and fun things to do. I don't personally see a lot of value in joining open source projects, but perhaps there is, perhaps not. Depends what project; you wouldn't want to waste time contributing to something that dies (of course some time spent learning is beneficial, but it's not ideal). My preference is for personal projects that have some general benefit (this is how I've learned various things and learned to love trac and hudson and nunit and so on). -- Noon Silk http://dnoondt.wordpress.com/ (Noon Silk) | http://www.mirios.com.au:8081 > "Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy — the joy of being this signature."
