>If you're doing a web app, you can ignore everything to do with WebForms, WPF, WF, WCF.
>If you're doing a WinForm app, you can ignore everything to do with Web, WPF, WF, WCF.
>If you don't need to write to/read from text files, you can ignore System.IO.

The book and articles I was reading at the time avoided these three sentences in a wide arc. It didn't sound that simple at all.

>And what's wrong with finding out what you did isn't intended for your need. You just learned something. Having lived in the US, you probably know a little bit about baseball. For a long, long time Babe Ruth held the record for the most career home runs. Guess who holds the record for the most strikeouts? Babe Ruth. Accepting failure, learning from it, and moving on should be part of what we do. I propose that trying some new technique and finding out it isn't suitable for us isn't failure. It's a success if we look at as a learning experience.

The trial and error are my old friends, never been afraid of that. The problem with these libraries is their sheer size (of the interface, I mean). The time between getting into one of them, looking at what's available etc and the time I realize I got to the 14th floor alright, but wrong building, is a tad too long. I haven't tried any of that in the last eight years at least, but every now and then I encounter some component written in it (or emulating it, like the GDI+ library we have here), and the interface seems just too baroque, with too many variants of similar stuff, it's rather hard to find exactly what you need, but easy to accidentally pick the wrong one, because their names are similar, font is too small and the characters are dancing :).

Not specifically bashing dot net, I've done enough of that over the years, just explaining why learning it would be, for me, an expenditure of time and effort I can't justify.