.NET, the future Java platform?

Last week I followed a course on the .NET framework and I was really impressed! The first day we got an explanation about what the framework is and is not, and I must admit I was one of those guys saying, it's Java they stole it. So the first day was a bit like know this, been there already.

The second day we started working with "Visual Studio 2005" programming some C# webservices. Oh man I wish we could have something like this for Java programming. Ok, we have Eclispe which is wonderfull (and for free), but if you look at it's commercial brother from IBM, "Websphere Studio" I think, which is really crap. It's just not comparable with VS 2005. I was even able to run more than one VS 2005 program, in the past I wasn't even able to run one instance of WS decently. So SUN, please if you don't want Java to loose it's developers create a VS 2005 for Java... or let your friend MS do it for you they know how to create an IDE.

Furthermore since I've been programming Java since University, which has been a while now, I really like the C# (C-sharp) language because it has much resemblance to the Java language. I only find it hard to use Microsoft's way of using upper- and lowercase which is definitly not the same as in Java. But since I am planning to use it more it will grow on me, like Java did.

Creating Webservices is also very easy to do, it's actually a matter of creating a class with methods that you call/annotate webmethods. Well it's a bit more complicated, but not much. I know I once created webservices in Java, which was really hard, don't know how it evolved since then... .

We also saw some ADO.NET and ASP.NET (web pages) which was also kind of nice but have to look deeper into it because we only had time to scratch the surface. But again I remember how I created web applications with Java, it wasn't not as easy as with ASP.NET.

I'm not saying that Java is bad, I really love it. But I really think we need better tools to support Java, come on SUN take a look at VS 2005 and do something with it. Make programming Java as easy as programming .NET applications.

By the way, on saturday evening I created a picture slide show application for my I-mate SP3i it was so easy to do, I could even deploy the app on my phone and saw what was happening in VS 2005 running on my laptop. Thank you Microsoft for .NET and VS 2005!

Bill, maybe you could give a little help to those Mono guys that would really make my day!