It's not without its faults, but a lot of the negativity expressed towards it is unwarranted.
Try Haskell, Lisp, Forth, assembly (on bare metal - write your own kernel), Erlang and anything that's "too weird" for most "enteprisey" developers. Buy an old 8-bit computer at eBay just to get a hang of what is programming within 64K of memory. Make hardware for it. Play with non-relational databases.
Most important advice of all: play. You are not learning a job, you are becoming a craftsman (craftsperson?). If you don't enjoy it, you won't do it well.
You'll have time to learn Java, .NET and even Python and Ruby later.
I did the same thing (Lisp, Forth, BSD, OCaml, playing with an old pizzabox Sparcstation), but I was a history major. :)
Sure, in college, you should work with more academic and esoteric languages. I learned Lisp in college.
The point is, many people dismiss the merits of Microsoft tools and languages. One guy I worked with said, "I haven't used any Microsoft products in years" and that's supposed to make you an expert on them somehow? :)
No. But it has a good chance of making their experience broader. Microsoft is nothing but a tiny spec in the software development tools set. Using only Microsoft is not a good sign.
On the other hand, perfectly good things like C# (especially with LINQ and ASP.NET MVC) are being dismissed out-of-hand by otherwise reasonable people just because they came from Redmond.
I agree, C# is a better language than Java, but that doesn't mean I'm going to use it. There's more to choosing a language than the language itself. The environment is at least as important.
I wonder if there's any chance of MS ever porting CLR to the *nixes...
How did you found out about it?
I can't find a mailing list. Do you know of some way of contacting the author?