I have been in QA for 10 years, trying to get into developement for about 5 of them. I have taken classes in C++, Java and C#. I was able to write some tools and unit tests in C# at my current job and (by all accounts) did a good job of it.

However, 8 months ago, my employer tasked me with the responsibility of establishing the new QA group. Now, I'm doing manual testing and deployment with no promise of returning to development. I have looked at the job boards and there are a lot of jobs for Web developers and wondered how I could break into that. I've picked up some books on Ruby on Rails that I plan to work through on the Mac at home, but I'm not sure employers would be interested in anything but commercial web development.

Do you have any suggestions on how I can use my experience to get a job as a junior developer? And I mean one that entailes programming...the postings I've seen for junior developer amount to doing all the grunt work besides coding. They should just call them "Technical Secretaries".