Getting Work as a .NET Developer
This probably should've been asked as a followup to my previous question (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1185433/knowledge-and-skills-in-cvs) but I thought I would start afresh.

I'm in a situation where I have a CS degree and a years experience however the experience I've gained in this position has been with mostly open source (or at least open) technologies including Postgres, Python, XML and Linux. Taking a look through the job market here it's plain to see that these skills are not going to transfer across directly to another position (at least not at a junior level) so I've been looking at .NET jobs. Problem is that I'm in a bit of a catch 22 situation with my experience (Junior positions requiring at least a bit of commercial .NET experience) and since we're in a recession now there are a lot of highly skilled .NET developers chasing after the junior positions. To make matters worse the recruiters I've spoken to have been fairly lukewarm towards my job prospects. While most were quite understanding of my situation one had the audacity to suggest I should only be taking a "cursory" look at the job sites and that if I call Microsoft and "be nice" they might "help" me leverage my experience in Postgres towards T-SQL - WTF? 

Do University assignments and personal projects undertaken in C# and other .NET technologies count towards experience for these types of roles? What more could I be doing to make myself more attractive to these types of jobs? Another question I've got is whether there might be some sort of bias in .NET shops against people who have worked in open source - I know there can be a lot of Microsoft hate out there but as long as a language or technology helps me solve a problem I don't really care who made it. 
Getting Work as a .NET Developer
===

This probably should've been asked as a followup to my previous question (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1185433/knowledge-and-skills-in-cvs) but I thought I would start afresh.

I'm in a situation where I have a CS degree and a years experience however the experience I've gained in this position has been with mostly open source (or at least open) technologies including Postgres, Python, XML and Linux. Taking a look through the job market here it's plain to see that these skills are not going to transfer across directly to another position (at least not at a junior level) so I've been looking at .NET jobs. Problem is that I'm in a bit of a catch 22 situation with my experience (Junior positions requiring at least a bit of commercial .NET experience) and since we're in a recession now there are a lot of highly skilled .NET developers chasing after the junior positions. To make matters worse the recruiters I've spoken to have been fairly lukewarm towards my job prospects. While most were quite understanding of my situation one had the audacity to suggest I should only be taking a "cursory" look at the job sites and that if I call Microsoft and "be nice" they might "help" me leverage my experience in Postgres towards T-SQL - WTF? 

Do University assignments and personal projects undertaken in C# and other .NET technologies count towards experience for these types of roles? What more could I be doing to make myself more attractive to these types of jobs? Another question I've got is whether there might be some sort of bias in .NET shops against people who have worked in open source - I know there can be a lot of Microsoft hate out there but as long as a language or technology helps me solve a problem I don't really care who made it. 