Reddit mentions of Professional Test Driven Development with C#: Developing Real World Applications with TDD

First up, find where the developers are. I know you said there aren't many jobs in your town/city, but there should be within driving distance.

Most larger cities generally have developer user groups. Find them and start going. Most of them meet once a month. Attend the talks, meet people there (there are often even recruiters), help out where you can. Make it so that people know you by sight (and preferably by name). This will help you get known and you will learn new things.

Get a twitter account. Start following developers in your area (and other areas for that matter). You will learn things and can interact with people in the field you want to be in.

Get a linked in account. Add the people you know. As you meet people at user groups, etc, add them. Linked In is a very useful tool. Among other things, it lets you see who you know that is working for a company that you want to work for. It can help you bypass the trash bin.

Put code on github. It doesn't have to be amazing, but code samples will generally only help. Knowing a VCS is also a job requirement at a lot of places and git is a commonly used VCS, so there's a double win for you.

Mention the fact that you have publicly viewable code on your resume.

Learn how to unit test and do TDD. First off, it will help you find bugs before they bite you in the ass. Secondly, it's yet another skill that a lot of places want you to have. Third, this opens up the realm of doing code kata which will help you get better (since it forces you to write code) and will give you more code samples to put on github.

Code samples - Okay, I know I've said code kata are a good idea and can give you some samples (and it's true). Now, for something heavier, find things that annoy you and write code to make it better. Write a backup program for your computer. Write a program that will let you keep track of where you've applied to jobs, who you've spoken with, etc etc etc.

It doesn't matter much what you code just as long as you do code. Doing it will make you better.

If you're feeling adventurous, start looking at open source projects and seeing if you can contribute. Even if it's just doing grunt work like documentation. And put THAT on your resume.

Get a CodeEval account (it's free). Complete coding challenges in the languages you want to do work in (they range from "hey, this is easy" to "holy shit"). When you get ranked in a top x%, put THAT on your resume. (top percentages on CodeEval start getting awarded at top 20%).

Learn new stuff. For example, if you want to do web dev in the .NET world, you'll want to know C# or VB.NET (preferably C#, at least around here), javascript and jquery, HTML, and CSS.

There are a lot of resources for this.

www.codecademy.com can help you learn HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery, PHP, Python and Ruby.

If you're doing C# and want to learn TDD, James Bender's book is a good resource

The C# All in one book from Wiley is a decent overview of C#, and the author, Bill Sempf is very approachable. (I linked the latest version, but the 2010 version is very good as well)

Pluralsight has a lot of great online training on a metric crap ton of subjects as well. If you can't afford it, let's just say that you can find some of the courses on a site that rhymes with "Sky Rats May"

Make StackOvervlow your friend. Create an account, ask questions and, more importantly, when you can, answer them. Helping other people will help make you better too.

There are a lot of resources out there both digital, paper, and people. For the people, you might have to drive an hour or so to get to the user groups, but it can be worth it.