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A lot of companies that run in-house IT staff are not looking for developers right now--there seems to be a push for outsourcing.
I've been toying with .NET since Beta 2, and I think I'm at a competent level of understanding now. At my company, there are no developers that do .NET development--everyone does ASP/VBA development. I'm one of 3 in the company that ventured on there own to learn it, and now (since everyone wants the newest and grooviest) I get to do all the new and fun stuff in CMS.NET. Still the company doesn't even plan on training other developers until sometime next year.
A few years ago in the dot Net mag, they had an article on how MS expected .NET to work its way around. If I remember correctly, they expected almost no growth for the first 2 years, and with proper marketing I believe they are hoping to drastically cut legacy application support as it should be phased out.
I hope that's true, and after what I saw on MSDN about Longhorn and .NET 2.0...man, .NET development is really going to get fun (especially since I love XML programming).
Good luck!
1 I won't say there are no jobs. There are jobs but the problem is market condition. Market is not good enough to hire a fresher when you can get an experience programmer for less who can take requirements, design, code, test, and deploy solutions. Hopefully market conditions get better soon ..