Daniel is asking several good questions about experstise. Here are my answers:

1. Is it possible to be passionate without being a zealot?
   Hm, I certainly hope so. I am passionate about many subjects, but I think that I am still able to listen to the other side and have a reasonable discussion.
2. If someone came up with something better than the .net framework, would you switch?
   This is a really tough question. It would have to be something with an order of magnitude improvement over .Net, something like the switch from C++ to C#, in order to make me consider it for most of my activities. Right now, I don't see it coming.
   Beyond that, there is a big issue with abandoning knowledge. I know a lot about .Net, from how to do dynamic code generation to why you are allowed to do double locking to what is happening when you specify RegexOption.Compiled. I can read a stack trace and usually pinpoint the problem with ease. I wouldn't be able to do that in another technology for a long time, and that is an important part of what makes me effective developer, that I know my environment. I'm not talking about just the API, I am talking that I am comportable editing msbuild / nant files, and that I have extensive knowledge of keyboard shortcuts, that I know how fusion loads an assembly, and how I can interfer with that. I can fuzz around with the internals of ASP.Net and AppDomain load issues with confidence.
   Getting anywhere near this level of confidence is not something that is just going to happened.
   There is a reason why I don't label myself as Java / C++ guy. I know both language reasonably well. And I have a lot of experiance
3. How much of your identity is bound to being a .net programmer?
   Moo. The question cannot be answered within the given parameters. (I actually has an exception message that throws this.)
   My identity has nothing to do to being a .net programmer. I am a developer that happens to be working on .Net. If I were to make a different decision several years ago you would have probably seen quite a lot of posts here about log4j and Hibernate, praising IntelliJ and writing Groovy DSL for Spring configurations :-)