I think the differences between C# 1 and the current Java have been rather downplayed by this discussion. C#1 was different from Java in a number of very impor

I think the differences between C# 1 and the current Java have been rather downplayed by this discussion. C#1 was different from Java in a number of very important ways: * You could call directly into the Win32 API (the issue that caused Sun and Microsoft to fall out) * Value Types. Still being discussed for v8. * Lambdas. Yes, in version 1. * C# had enums, Java didn't. (Now Java has better enums than C#) * A syntactic sugar for property get/set. This was extremely important to Microsoft. * A decent COM-interop story. Again, very important to Microsoft. Of course it was similar. It was a design goal to be able to run Java code on the .NET VM. But it was far from identical. Jon Skeet could no doubt expand this list