My names Mathew, I've been watching the VB .net story and would like to say that i also use VB2005 day by day and am happy with it, this is because it gets the job i need it to do without to much time wasted thinking about how it's done. All my users are MS users, as the company have forced that on us!?. Yes i've learn C++, done some Delphi (7 i think), but Basic has been with me since the ZX Spectrum 48K.
Would love to come to the Alug meetings but will find it difficult due to hearing problems.
As I understand it MS do allow code from the MSIL to run as native code but you have to create an image from the code (never actually do it), the documentation say that MSIL allows code to be JIT'ed for the target at runtime with optimzation thrown in.
All that said I would like to learn C# just to look good on my CV. But learning how to code for a linux box would be a very good plus for me.
Mat
By the way, the C# book thing, any library can loan you a book for about 6 to 9 weeks in total this should give you time to see if that's the one for you to buy nor not, costing you nothing if it's not