.NET 4 is fantastic, and highly productive. There are plenty of cool things you can do with the Entity Framework, and WCF Data Services, to get your data tier built quickly, and give you 100% queryable web services that support both OData and JSON without mush hassle.
On the MVC side, ASP.NET MVC 3 is due out any day now, and they have a new rails-like Razor syntax that can really cut down on the coding, if you're into that sort of thing. These days, I do most of my work in Silverlight, because I like rich applications.
If you want to learn how to do these things, Channel9 on MSDN is a HUGE help, with plenty of videos and training on a variety of topics.
I personally think that now is the best time to be a .NET developer... .NET 4 really makes things easy without a whole lot of effort. If you get the option to start from scratch and not have to take a lot of legacy, BS decisions with you, you'll go far quickly.
On the MVC side, ASP.NET MVC 3 is due out any day now, and they have a new rails-like Razor syntax that can really cut down on the coding, if you're into that sort of thing. These days, I do most of my work in Silverlight, because I like rich applications.
If you want to learn how to do these things, Channel9 on MSDN is a HUGE help, with plenty of videos and training on a variety of topics.
I personally think that now is the best time to be a .NET developer... .NET 4 really makes things easy without a whole lot of effort. If you get the option to start from scratch and not have to take a lot of legacy, BS decisions with you, you'll go far quickly.
HTH!
Robert McLaws http://www.windows-now.com