Coping with rapidly changing technology (in particular Microsoft)

You don't need to be constantly updating your production work to use the latest and greatest technology. But you should stay knowledgable about what is out there and what is being created. There will come a time when it is appropriate to start using the new technology, but that all heavily depends on your projects and timelines.

But at some point you will need to move on. Certain technologies become unsupported. You should be aware of when this will happen, and plan the future of your production work to match.

I share your sentiment about Microsoft's output. It has its benefits, true, but their constant stream of releases is hard to keep track of and often leads to a cluttered (and sometimes nonfunctioning) computing environment. And their products often overlap in functionality, as if different teams are attacking the same problem from different ends without talking to each other. And time spent learning their stuff early is wasted if the product turns out to be a dud.

Anyway, I say as a rule, learn what interests you, and ignore the rest. It's the best (only?) way to stay motivated and to keep learning. This effort should be all about you, not Microsoft.

If you're like me and have more interests than time to pursue them, then you need to find ways to be more efficient: reduce your "time overhead" (time spent on uninteresting things), use time you're not using now, and learn faster.

I find that the techniques for efficiency in the real world are often similar to what you'd do when writing software. Think about your "life performance" as if it were a program, and find ways to optimize it - maybe by trading off one resource for another, caching, etc.

More specifically, here's what I like to do:

1) Don't feel like you need to know everything about a topic you're interested in. Learn it in a level of detail appropriate to your level of interest.

2) In programming, look for an interesting problem and create a spike solution for it. If the spike is actually usable, all the better. For me, the best way to learn a new language or technology is to get my grubby hands on it and make something.

3) Minimize multitasking. What I do is try to always have exactly two things to be working on - when one is held up, I work on the other. It's rare that both will be held up, and trying to spread my attention across more than two things both causes the quality of my attention to suffer, and also introduce

I don't think you're the only one feeling that C# has grown really quickly. Fortunately the changes announced for C# 4.0 and .NET 4.0 are by no means as overwhelming as the new features of C# 3. They are very nice features, and I'm especially looking forward to IronPython and IronRuby as well as new TDD features of VS2010.

Yes, technology moves fast, actually every industry moves fast. It moves as fast as people are willing to create things. I think the comment that comes to mind is specialize. Find something you enjoy and specialize. You will never insulate yourself from change, the key is to make yourself marketable and pick the things you want to learn, not the things someone else tells you are hot. As we've seen, there are many companies out there who do not even deploy the .NET Framework on their machines, because with the apps they currently use, they have no need. Those companies will start to upgrade, but many of those upgrades are decade long migrations.