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I keep trying to convince my wife that cuddling is harmful.  Perhaps this post will do the trick :)

-Bill

For a true geek, cuddling may be harmful. I think he meant coddling. Then again...

In the .NET space how many fair dinkum (true) LEARNING environments are there where the toolsets, Microsoft or otherwise, are considered means and not ends in themselves, where the objective is always to increasingly learn to deliver more business value, early and often, to satiate the user communities' expectations. Learning environments where everyone wants to learn and to share their lerarning with their peers. How does a team become so much more than the sum of its parts?

My rant would be that as a general rule in the Microsoft development community instead of responding to increasing business expectations with more productive practices and learning how to better apply basic principles, we have a tendency to wait for the next visual designer or tool from Microsoft which Microsoft marketing tells us will address the development issues that are confronting us. The tools become the ends in themselves.

Are 99% of us .NET developers just Morts? Where are fair dinkum LEARNING environments in our community?

@Bill & Donni

Yes he changed his title to Coddling, eloquent as he is, we often forget he is not a native English speaker!  ... I prefer Cuddling though, so I left it :)

"If you aren't willing to put in the time and effort, then you probably should be in an easier profession."

Casey: What are different examples of an 'easier' profession that brings similar monetary benefits, challenge -- and the so-called satisfaction of doing things??

Today, the entire country is in a crisis mode, young graduates are already turning themselves away from the programming profession. Titles (note - I said 'titles') of such blog posts should be chosen carefully and reflect effective solutions as well. I know, I know, you say at the end of your blog post "... I would offer every encouragement and helping hand, but in return you must put the effort in, and strive to be better.". That's good attitude, great in fact. But, if majority of people only read your blog post title and not the content (just like here on the formats of DZone - not to pick on DZone, it is a good service), it only helps to spread only the negative word, plus very fast in today's media.

After all, senior developers like us have some additional responsibility to bear - just a little more than the average. We are not Gods by any means.

Last but not the least - thank you for your blog post.

I believe that the need to continuously learn new frameworks, techniques and even languages, is what makes the developer's job interesting. Try to imagine yourself working in C all your professional life (40 years or so) with always the same libraries (and I don't talk about assembly). I could not! I am grateful to people (in particular in the OSS community) and organizations for bringing us new things to learn on an almost daily basis.

Of course, the downside is that you may feel you will never have enough time to catch up, but you have to make choices, anyway you cannot know every single language and framework that exist.

Of course, not all developers are like this. Some develop for a living; that's fair, too, but for them, yes, it will be harder, because they WILL have to spend some time learning (generally outside working time) in order to keep current with technologies.

I'm in the "passionate developer" category, hence I don't count my time on trying to be aware of what's new, evaluating new frameworks (or building projects on these), learning new languages (that I may never use professionally, but that will still develop my way of thinking and will bring me some indirect benefits).