>I take my heat off to you for taking the time and learning .NET. I don't know if I ever will.

I wanted to add a comment to this. What I've found is that every programmer learns best by different methods. Some do well in the class environment, some just by studying, some by watching videos or reading books, some by practice. What works for me seems to be a class environment (online or in person), and then practice. It all started to really click (being able to code without checking everything first) when I had to actually do something real. I had done a few sample apps to learn, but when I was assigned a research project to find the best means of accomplishing something, I had to DIG IN and DO IT to test each possibility. That was the best learning tool.