What do junior developers find interesting in the .NET world?

Lately, I've been visiting many educational institutes and speaking about .NET technologies, Visual Studio and software development as a business. Every time there is a interesting set of attendees, some of which have already entered software development companies to work there as junior developers, testers or web developers. With this in mind, it is interesting to look at those technologies that they find compelling.

Since junior developers (et al.) don't yet have a long professional experience, they tend to focus on technologies that appeal to them personally (often games) or that solve the problems they currently are working with. Also, their focus is often more on pure technology, instead of the business reasons on using a certain technology.

During these sessions, I've tried to identify technologies that are of interest to the attendees. So far, I've been able to list at least four technologies/products in this category: Expression Blend with its great visual potentiality, Windows Phone 7 development with Silverlight, XNA for games, and ASP.NET Dynamic Data for very quick web front-ends for databases. On a lighter side, IIS Smooth Streaming, DeepZoom and Kodu bring up the cheers in the audience every time.

Tomorrow's again another show, and I'm looking forward to letting people know about these things. It's not so much anymore about what technology can do, it's more of what you can imagine to be done.