The information below is pretty wild. .NET 2.0 is really great. I have been teaching on this since Jan 2005 and using it in production since B2 came out around March. I must say I am really impressed with both performance and ease of use. Of course, I use VB.NET all the time.
1. NET vs. J2EE and IBM WebSphere Adoption for Mission Critical Apps: The IDC Study
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IDC-conducted study of adoption rates of OS and application platform/vendors for mission critical applications conducted in 8 countries (Asia, Europe, North America)
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Conducted with large companies, central IT across Devs, Architects and IT Managers
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Random selection of companies, scientific/projectable data across large sample size (>2,000 participants WW)
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Shows strong data for .NET over J2EE, Windows over Unix/Linux, MS over IBM as preferred vendor
2. New Technical Benchmarks of .NET 2.0 vs. IBM WebSphere 6.0
Downloadable whitepapers, all source code and customer-ready benchmark kits at http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/java /compare/