@Ameesh, calm down dude, it's a development platform not a religion, people should stop taking programming languages so seriously.
@Stiler, .NET programming has nothing to do with that MSN crap, it's microsoft marketing linking them
@joohang, Dan Appleman is a personal friend and boss of mine, he runs Apress, which publishes tons of high quality .NET books, and his company, Desaware, is doing fairly well. Now he did program in VB before, but mostly for GUI, Desaware makes VB tools, which tend to be written in C++. Anyhoo, he wrote an ebook comparing VB.NET to C#, and to be honest, theres barely any diffrence except for unsafe. It really all depends on your coding technique and what you view to be more readable. Compare the IL of a C# program and a VB.NET program with the same code, almost identical 

. 
Anyhoo, .NET is an excellent platform, and VS.NET is an excellent IDE. There really are few changes to it over java, except quite a bit of cleaner syntax, and easier to crossdevelop stuff. To be honest, it has little advantage for a java programmer, but if you program for windows, C# makes it much easier then MFC. If your starting out in web services, C# is just as good a language to learn as java(and they are practically the same).