Moving on

[oliverson]

I may not be the best person to advise here as I am a former perm just trying to get into contracting. But for your skillset I think the next step could be to go the .NET Core route (with ASP.NET CORE, EF Core, etc.). Yes, I know it's very new but it is open-source and cross-platform and it will mature.

I did research this area and I convinced myself recently that it is likely the future of MS stack and although new, I feel it will have the original .NET stack longevity and it's smart to get on it now. This is where I put my money.

It will also be an easy transition for you, episodically if you've done MVC5.

As I said I am new to contracting, but I got a few perm offers recently and the process of looking for these convinced my how important MS stack is in the corporate world. .NET Core stack will likely increase this importance.

In terms of re-skilling, I found I can no longer sit and read books or long tech posts. But I found watching good quality videos such as those on pluralsight or lynda makes it quite enjoyable to learn new stuff, at least for me.

I spent the early part of this year doing proof of concepts for a client on .NET Core and Angular 2. Let's be clear on this. .Net Core is a complete and utter rip-off of Node.js. It's vintage Microsoft. The issue I have for this kind of setup is that it may well improve on node performance and offer multi-threaded capability but it just introduces another package manager (nuget), another project configuration (msbuild I think they have reverted to now, from json), just more complexity that simply isn't needed. Anybody considering doing server-side MVC is living in the past. It's all client-side MVC frameworks now like Angular and React. This, coming from a guy who makes a very good living off the MS stack and has done so since .NET Beta 1. MS should have focused on what they can actually control (Enterprise desktop development - windows is still everywhere) instead of wanting a piece of Apple and Google's pie. It's backfired and now they are nowhere.

But all the innovation is happening away from MS these days, yet luddites like me are/were clinging on hoping for a return to form. It ain't happening. The world has moved on and despite being dragged kicking and screaming into this new web stack/open source world, it ain't that bad really. Different but fundamentally the same. Different terms for similar concepts. Very little is new these days except the marketing.