Interesting article on a meeting between a few Java "champion-ers" and MS's .net team.

Quote/Gist:
> Business is business, so if Java developers can reasonably
> expect to profit from interoperating with .Net, then many
> will probably at least be willing to listen.

The author ("Rick Ross is the founder of JavaLobby and president of Usermagnet...") goes on to gush about .net like he was fed some MS brownies, talking about how impressive and intelligent the MS employees were (which I don't doubt for a second -- see my paper "Brillant Ideas Run Through a Profit Maximization Machine" aka "Brillant Peoples' Work Can't Wash Off PR Stink"), hinting that he'd like Java to pick up some of the features of C# ("Oh, my!"), and talking about some lame excuse that MS created J# so that Visual Studio.NET could be used in classroom. Last part sounds a little bogus to me -- I don't doubt that's part of the story, but all of it? In my experience with the J# beta, you're given just enough rope to hang... You've got nearly all of Java 1.1.4 (not unlike what you can do on Mac Classic with Java) and you've got all of .net in a Java-friendly object model. If you want some "advanced" functionality (ie, what's not in 1.1.4) you'd readily pull from .net classes, I think. Once you've discovered .net's usefulness, you might as well use C#, right? ;^)

I think one of the best points made in the article regards MS's attempts to officially standardize .net and C#. He points out that it'd take a company with pretty blamed deep pockets to actually implement the standards (aka "porting Windows OS to your platform" (that's me talking there)), so expect .net to tie you to Windows just like visual studio products have in the past. Busting walls with lip service doesn't amount to much.