Good ideas, Alex.
-- It involves learning a new language
It also involves learning a new word - polyfacetic. That's a beaut!

--concentrate on your immediate needs and how to solve them with the new set of tools.
Good idea. That's what I've been doing and I have some good results to show for my efforts.

When I read the dialogues about which technique is better to solve a simple problem,
I think of this jingle:

The philosopher Buridan,
alack and alas
Is princip'ly known
for his logical ass.
When placed in between
two big piles of hay,
The donkey refused
to move either way.
Since it could discover
(though God knows it tried)
No preference in either,
it starved and it died.








--The trauma is actually a polyfacetic one: It involves learning a new language (or two), new IDE, a framework, a design approach, and then a couple of technologies that are really just additional framework components packaged in fancy names (WCF, WPF, etc?) that will render existing techniques and technologies obsolete before you even have a chance to learn them.

At this stage, unless you have the time and resources to attend a formal class on the subject (and considering its vastness, it'll likely be a looong class), concentrate on your immediate needs and how to solve them with the new set of tools.

Yeah, you will end up using a pipe wrench for something you could've done with a set of fine plyers, if you catch my drift, but that's what learning is about and if you've been in this business long enough, you have learned to live with the fact that the first few apps you write using a new language/tool/framework/you name it is going to be something you would rather die than show it to a fellow developer :-)