I started out writing applications in C for a software development shop in Japan, did alot of work in C++/MFC, and some DirectX, at two Silicon Valley startups, and have been working with C# and Windows Forms ever since the release of .Net 1.0. Although I took a couple intro. to CS courses at CAL (Berkeley), my degree was actually in Asian Studies, and I learned to program "in the trenches". I was also the .Net evangelist at my most recent company, authoring internal white papers on .Net, sending out a weekly ".Net FYI" e-mail, conducting .Net training, and sweating the truth out of job candidates who claimed to have .Net experience (You'd be amazed at the number of Silicon Valley engineers who list "three years of C#" on their resumes, who are unable to explain how to hook up a simple event handler, or identify basic terms like "reflection", "attributes" -- or "Richter" and "Löwy").