>>Bonnie, don't read Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Just a heads up. ;)
>
>That bad, huh? OK, I won't touch it! Never heard of Thomas Mann anyway.
>

You must not pay much attention to European authors, then ;-) That book is considered a classic of world literature. I have not read it, which apparently Alan has, but it's not some unknown book.

Total change of subject: I bought NetAdvantage from Infragistics, which is the combo edition containing all their WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET, and Silverlight controls. I have invested a significant amount of time already learning .NET and still have not made a nickel on it. Time to push my knowledge to the next level. One of the appeals of this package is you get C# source code for all the controls. You can bet I will be up to my elbows in that. My goal is to write a non-trivial .NET app by the end of the year which I can show people. My lack of job experience is definitely a minus but I think I can offset it with a good demo app -- "Hey, I know how to do this stuff."

Do you have any experience with Infragistics? (You or any of our other .NET folks). Any tips?