Howdy, Cindy!
I'm hoping to get back to doing VB.NET work soon
Which is basically dragging and dropping things!
I'm kidding
You know, when I was a junior developer, I used to see the code created by senior developers, and couldn't understand anything... I asked myself: what can I do to be able to create fancy codes like these? One of the ways I found was to get certifications... and today, things are so more natural... I really really learned a lot of things studying for the certifications. But maybe the most important thing is to read a lot... all the knowledge you need is in the books. Becoming a good developer/API designer is not a trivial task; actually, being a good Java developer is really really hard and it requires a lot of studying. Becoming certified was cool to me also because today I often publish articles in a brazilian Java magazine, so it makes me look good in the picture
But, you know... all the effort was worth it. Today, I'm using a lot of cool things, like Spring, Spring WS, Jaxb, Hibernate... if you still didn't get there, keep going. It requires a lot of effort, but in the end, you'll feel very good about yourself.