Where now?

I feel like I’ve learnt a lot as a developer in the last 12 months; increasingly though I am frustrated with PHP. I’ve spent several months researching other languages as a new direction for my personal development efforts (no scope to move from PHP at work). I had my targets set on C#.

Prior to frequenting Channel9 I was quite the anti-MS & an open source zealot. However I believe C# is a promising technology; with some interesting developments in the pipeline.

My only gripe with C# is the cost, being tied to Windows and upgrade cycles. I have installed mono but trying to use MS Visual Web Developer as an IDE (which is .NET 2.0 friendly) caused for a bit of conflict.