It helps to have experience writing software to really understand security. Once you've written it, you'll have a better understanding of how to hack it. Software dev skills are definatly more transferable and what you chose to start with is not what you have to pursue for the rest of your years so you don't need to put so much pressure on the decision you make now. Things change and so will you Good luck

Agreed, if its going to be production code then it needs to be unit tested which makes the decision for you. Scripts are good for adhoc operations tasks but not for a production system that's going to evolve and go through a number of versions

I'm thinking of taking this course soon http://scpd.stanford.edu/computerSecurity/certificate-overview.php[^] Does anyone here have any experience of it or could recommend something similar? Cheers

Its true. Microsoft is not cool and you wont see many people using a Microsoft device in your local coffee shop but a huge amount of the technology and infrastructure that underpins our daily lives is powered by Microsoft and I don't see any appetite at all for the big enterprise projects currently using Microsoft to move to other technology stacks. I read somewhere that maybe we would one day see the enterprise part of Microsoft devolved away from the consumer side. If that ever happened it feels to me like the enterprise part would be far the stronger company.