Take a look at this
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/03_09/B382203linux.htm I know this is not strictly relevant with J2EE vs .NET, but there is some corelationship.
I had some projects using VB.NET, ADO.NET, DCOM, Stored Procedure, MS version of DOM and XSL, and MS SQL Server 2000. It's quite easy for the developer to use .NET. BUT while i was doing .NET projects, I was sick and tired of looking up the sample code in MS library and excerpts, finally moved to Java. If you want to go with .NET, you have to completely dependent on every products in one specific vendors.
I don't doubt VB is king of client sides. But in the serverside i still doubt .NET can reach J2ee and its compliants except asp (not asp.net).
Is IIS application server to compare with weblogic/websphere? i have thought that's webserver you can compare with Apache.
Take a look at the other site about web-server survey.
http://news.netcraft.com/ You can see Apache is uprising. Very few apache runs with windows, which can be run by .net, ms sql server, asp, etc.
I envision the company losing Unix market(guess who,,, it's sun) could heavily focused on software market(java/j2ee) later on, and the big guys like ibm, hp/compaq, and the intel could sell the hardware using enlightning cheap Linux server. Even Larry at Oracle have already moved the step to linux/java/j2ee.
I feel like .NET fails the market(I mean the server side, though that still can manage to cheap client side).
I guess it's time for Linux+java. Don't hesitate try to use .NET if you stil think worthwhile to try it. I would try dotGNU (not mono) then we will see whether C# library can be ported as J2EE compliant. Google, Amazon, Yahoo(freeBSD) all runs with linux (so i guess it must be J2EE compliants). Even Dell except NT webserver heavily uses linux with Oracle DBs.(they say NT webserver isn't broken, that's why they are just using win2000 server)). I wonder why money greedy Sun doesn give up solaris and focus on Java/J2ee products.
[ April 01, 2003: Message edited by: stephen Kang ]