I think that normally, when people compare Java to .NET, they're either comparing the Runtime Environments, the Class Libraries, or they're comparing the whole

I think that normally, when people compare Java to .NET, they're either comparing the Runtime Environments, the Class Libraries, or they're comparing the whole 'development stack' which usually includes the primary language (eg Java or C#) and the primary OS (eg Solaris/*nix or Windows) and a variety of other tools like Eclipse or Visual Studio. Java is funny in that it uses the same name for like 4 different things, while MS makes a greater effort to distinguish between them. VB.NET is basically C# with a bit of syntactic sugar to make life easier for Visual Basic 6.0 programmers transitioning to a more Java-like development style. The last time I checked, most of the .NET documentation includes code samples in each of the 4 main languages (C#, VB, J#, and C++).NET Usually, the C#, VB, and J# versions are close to identical. I've heard that the C# optimizer works better than any of the others, but that was 2 years ago and I didn't follow up.