Voted up because I'd like to see more people give .NET the college try. If you can put aside your biases about MSFT and start playing with the frameworks, you'll be impressed.
It's not without its faults, but a lot of the negativity expressed towards it is unwarranted.
I think in college you should broaden your mind instead of going after what you may have to learn anyway. In college, you have the luxury of time to experiment, something you rarely have later.
Try Haskell, Lisp, Forth, assembly (on bare metal - write your own kernel), Erlang and anything that's "too weird" for most "enteprisey" developers. Buy an old 8-bit computer at eBay just to get a hang of what is programming within 64K of memory. Make hardware for it. Play with non-relational databases.
Most important advice of all: play. You are not learning a job, you are becoming a craftsman (craftsperson?). If you don't enjoy it, you won't do it well.
You'll have time to learn Java, .NET and even Python and Ruby later.
I don't think you got the parent poster's meaning of "old college try".
Sure, in college, you should work with more academic and esoteric languages. I learned Lisp in college.
The point is, many people dismiss the merits of Microsoft tools and languages. One guy I worked with said, "I haven't used any Microsoft products in years" and that's supposed to make you an expert on them somehow? :)
> and that's supposed to make you an expert on them somehow?
No. But it has a good chance of making their experience broader. Microsoft is nothing but a tiny spec in the software development tools set. Using only Microsoft is not a good sign.
Absolutely, someone who uses only Microsoft technologies and tools is... impaired.
On the other hand, perfectly good things like C# (especially with LINQ and ASP.NET MVC) are being dismissed out-of-hand by otherwise reasonable people just because they came from Redmond.
It could be the best language and framework in the world, but it's not worth the vendor lock-in.
I agree, C# is a better language than Java, but that doesn't mean I'm going to use it. There's more to choosing a language than the language itself. The environment is at least as important.
Even if they do, I (and many others) still wouldn't use it then, because Microsoft has already abused their position in the past. I know I won't contribute to their success.
It's not without its faults, but a lot of the negativity expressed towards it is unwarranted.