I'm still a beginning programmer; I've been at it for 2 years. I've learned to work with a few languages, a bit of web development technologies, a handful of libraries, frameworks, and IDEs.

But over the past two years (and long before I even started, really), I keep hearing references to these...things. A million of them. Things such as C#, ADO, SOAP, ASP, ASP.NET, the .NET framework, CLR, F#, etc etc. And I've read their Wikipedia articles, in-depth, multiple times, and they all mention a million other things on that list, but I just can't seem to grasp what it all is. The only thing I've taken away with any certainty is that Microsoft is behind all of it. It sounds almost like a conspiracy.

Are all these technologies just for developing on the Windows platform? What is .NET? Do some software developers dedicate their entire career just to that side of things? Why would I want to get into it, and what advantage does...whatever it is...have over all the other technologies there are?

I hope this makes sense. It's a broad question, but inside it there's a very specific question asking about something I don't know the name of. Hopefully you can grasp my confusion.