>>At age 56, it is very difficult to stop everything going on in my life and retrain mself to some other software development tool and who is going to hire a 56-year old man who just started learning C#?
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>>I got my first big C# project after taking a one semester C# college course at the local university. BTW, I was 56 at the time. The hard part of software development is being able to understand the business problem and devise an approproate solution. Writing the code is the easy bit. Fortunately for me, there are people out there who think like I do. Right now there is a guy who is trying to bring me on board a big Silverlight project even though he knows that I have no Silverlight experience.
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>>Take a course and get a good commercial framework. Your years of experience as a developer are more important that knowing the syntax without looking at the help file.
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>I can only express my complete sympathy to this POV. The tools we use are the minor problem.

I agree.