Stuart,

Personnaly I think it depends what your end goal is. Do you want to learn something new so that you can change jobs, to keep up to date or just for fun.

If its the first one it will be difficult to persuade a propsepicte employer that you know your stuff, however well you may actually know it, if you dont have some comercial experience. If you can start inventing some reasons for coding small apps in .net this will help.

2 is pretty much the same, I dont find it bad to learn new stuff but if you are not using it every day\week you can quickly forget everything and that is a waste of effort.

3 - for fun, you must be mad, I'm sure you can think of something more fun than this, maybe waching the football or the pub!

I started as just a foxpro programmer but over time I have learned sql pretty well and now i'm using c# and web services. Although by the time I learn VS2003, VS2008 will be out and the same occurred with SQL2000 and SQL2005!

One other thing, I dont know your background, but stick to what you know to start with. If you come from a Windows Application background stick with c#,vb.net, if you have a web based background stick with that. You can always pick the other stuff up later.

This is just my 2 cents and some will probably disagree but, in my opinion, .net, whether we like it or not, will hold a large part of the software development market for the forthcoming years.

Good Luck.

Jon


>Hi
>I am once again toying with the idea of studying for one of the Microsoft exams, or am I better off learning all... well some of the new technologies coming out soon?
>What are your thoughts?
>TIA
>Stuart