It's helping me to hear these things. A person can get discouraged when the doors to opportunity seem to shut repeatedly. At first, I wasn't sure if .NET was going to fly and really didn't check it out on the Internet with web sites such as Dice, Monster or Indeed. But, recently, I wanted to know how .NET opportunities were doing. Once I checked it out, a more vivid and positive picture formed making it clear that you can't go wrong with it. I had my first C# class around 2002-2003. It seemed like a clumsy product back then, but it is much difference now with all of the improvements to the language and classes.
In the years 2004-2008, because I had a supposed "permanent" job, and the money was coming in and things were good, I stupidly became complacent. Then the California economy went south with its real estate, housing and other industries, which put my company in the red (my former company makes stucco wire, and other wire products) ; they had to make drastic cuts in order to survive. They are still struggling and are not back financially to the early days of 2002 through 2004. Complacency!
Time to get up, dust off and get going! I suppose if others my age and older can do it, I can too.
Cecil
>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#?
>I got my first big C# project after taking a one semester C# college course at the local university. By the way, 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.
>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.
