Java vs. C# series, Intro

I am a Sun Certified Java Programmer. I've implemented Java based solutions since 1999. I've implemented solutions including Applets, Swing, JavaServer Pages, Servlets, Enterprise JavaBeans, JDBC, Java Messaging Service, web services, and related technologies.

For the past 12 months I've been implementing solutions using C# .NET. And not using C# .NET in a completely different context (like mobile, compact, or embedded), but implementing it to solve a lot of the same business problems I was solving with Java - mainly client/server business applications accessing relational databases. Additionaly, I've had no formal training in C#.

I am starting a series that compares my experiences using Java related technologies with my experiences using C# .NET. In most cases I'm going to isolate a feature and say which I liked better for reasons that may or may not be highly technical. This is because I find real solutions to business problems that may or may not inherently be highly technical in nature. In other words, I won't address which is faster: Java StringBuffer or C# StringBuilder because in the type of work I do there is a very poor diminishing return on that knowledge. In some cases I'm going to explore the beauty of when these two technologies interoperate with each other, getting close to the published blueprints of Sun's and Microsoft's utopian worlds but probably bucking a little notion of what they actually had in mind.