>I plan to finish the ASP book and then to go back to watching from the sidelines.

Thats pretty much the attitude I've adopted as well. The faster you run through stuff like this, the more slip ups you will hit, and personally, life's too short for that right now.

Now I am going out on a limb here ("oh oh", you're probably thinking) but if I had to guess what .NET will be like in three years, I'd say the learning curve can be reduced by several years. I say this because of several things:

1. The open-ness of the CLR
2. The rate at which hardware is progressing
3. The competition between Microsoft and Sun (among others) for developers
4. The introduction of Web Services, leading to a major increase in very specific, very simple client applications

I think we're going to stumble across a language much simpler than VB.NET, something that looks more like UML than VB code. With the CLR, thats pretty cool. Given the fact that you could subclass between languages in the CLR, you could literally write most of your app in UML or pictures and then subclass any parts that don't meet your requirements in C# or VB.NET. Programming might move from Object Oriented Programming to something I've been thinking of as Requirement Oriented Programming.