how do i learned .net

So i guess all the cool kids are learning c# and whatev.
Should I?

I'm not too keen on the virtual machine/bitcode witchcraft so basically what else am i missing?

>>2

Ah yes, almost forgot - Microsofts compilers fail at optimizations too.  Put a try-catch-throw in your code, with nothing in the catch at all (other than a throw of the exception) and then check out the disassembly.  The compiler isn't smart enough to figure out that try-catch-throw is entirely without true function, and will literally catch the exception, stop the stack unwind, then rethrow it, and start unwinding the stack again.  Even in release build it does this.