In spite of the fact that our last projects are being developed in Java, the .NET is definitly our favorite platform.

In a twitter I saw the phrase: "Java the language is a stagnant mess". It's said in favour of C#. It's true that C# significantly affects now even on Java (let's remember generics, jaxb, web services, etc.), but in my opinion, the C# won't be the leading language for worldwide enterprise applications in the nearest future.

One of causes is that the main platform for .NET still is Windows. The situation could be changed by Mono project, but I think there are yet not enough projects on platforms other than Windows.

My guess is confirmed by some of observations that I did as a software engineer of an IT company. Our company performs different software porting projects from legacy programming languages like COBOL, ADSO, Natural etc. into up to date languages like Java, C# etc. It worth to say that clients rarely select to migrate to .NET despite to our advices.

The main reason of such choice, according to most of our clients, is that they want to be platform independent and only Java gives them this choice.

It worth for Microsoft to think about cooperation with Mono in order to make .NET really platform indpendent, otherwise C# will always be a step behind Java despite apparent advantages of C# as a programming language.