Should a novice programmer spend time learning to write "desktop" applications these days, or is the web where it's at?

I don't think it is ever a good idea to choose one side and stick with it religiously. I think a good engineer will expose themselves to as much as they can so he can make an informed decision about which is the best tool to complete a task.

In other words, don't choose a platform, OS, programming language, etc. and then ignore the others. It is best to be well-rounded in your skill set.

There will always be a market for native apps, although a lot of stuff is moving to the web and there's more scope than ever before for web based apps, native GUI applications are never going to go away entirely.

However, it's really, really hard to give you any really useful advice other than stick with what you like. If you use web stuff exclusively, it would be a bit foolish to go and become a windows GUI programmer :)

This may get modded down - but I'm going to say it anyway.

You can either program or you can't. About 18 months ago when I was looking for a new job, I was looking at the market and I was doing a lot of .NET but a few places wanted me to do JAVA.

I was doing Web Services, they wanted someone to do other stuff...At the end of the day it came down to this - if you know how to code you know how to code. If you're writing desktop apps right now and say in 6-8 months you want to move to some ASP.NET MVC, you'll be fine.

It may take you a bit of start-up time to learn the syntax and get a feel for some things - but in the end you'll be fine. I say this holds true for all the new languages...Skill is skill