Remember the days when Java was pitted against C++? Well for sometime now the question has been whether to go with C# or Java, .NET or EJB/Java?
We at Taragana normally work with Java Technologies only. Personally I am using Java since end of '95, almost after the 0.5 beta version came out. So when my friend & ex-boss (working at Seattle) tried to convince me to try out C#, I was skeptic because I was burn't with MS products in the past - easy at first glance, really bites when used for large-scale enterprise applications, not to mention very buggy. However he insisted and suggested I was probably losing my impartiality in not giving it a serious look. He thought that C# was the next big thing (with .NET) solely because it had the support ofMS. So I decided to take-up a small project in C# and get the ball rolling. Overall as you all know the languages are very similiar. I felt setup was more complex with C#, and overall the development & debugging were more cumbersome than Java. Performance wise, it looked to be slower with real-world applications. Off course and then there is always the fear of getting stuck to a single vendor. Overall for the simple project I felt both were more-or-less equivalent. However given a choice I would still choose Java. Interestingly Later on my friend commented that he felt that MS is losing traction of the market-place with their .NET strategy and maybe just maybe his perceptions was incorrect.

Here's an old debate on VB versus Java, where all I did was tried to console a poor folk who had to switch from Java to VB programming.