Java vs .NET

[Annngel]

Well hopefully i'm posting in the correct section.

My college is asking us to pick an elective soon and i'm totally lost. We've been briefed by both Heads from each Department and both are saying they are the best. They were both saying both are in demand in today's industry and then pointing fingers saying why etcetc is bad and so on

Basically the 2 selections and they are...

E-Commerce Technology (ECT) and Enterprise Computing (ENC)

A brief rundown..
ECT's subject will be

E-Commerce Solution Development
E-Commerce Security Architecture
Enterprise Commerce.

Basically this elective will be using the .NET architecture and all of Microsoft's Technologies.

And then ENC's subjects are

Enterprise Web Application Development
Distributed Systems and Connectivity
Mobile Device Programming.

And for this elective they are more focusing on open source using java and stuff.

So my thoughts, I think i'm gonna choose ENC because we'll be using Netbeans or Eclipse as our IDE and it'll be easier for me as you know i'm running Mac OS X.

I personally hate .NET because i have to either run in parallels/vmware to run Visual Studio 2008 OR to dual boot into Bootcamp Windows and it's not very fun to keep changing OS and even though i have 4GB memory and allocated 2GB for Windows when i'm running in virtualization it still feels a tad laggy and slow...

Besides i love apple and i hope one day i'll be a developer to develop apps for mac! But i keep reading on the internet saying java applications is bad bad bad and slow.. so.. sigh i don't know!

What are your thoughts? Any advise or anything?

Well both Head of Department did mention that at the end of the day after going through one elective it will not be difficult to switch over to another language.

 

[twoodcc]

you can use C# in Mac OS X.

but either way, you'll be able to change languages later if you wish

 

[Annngel]

I have a question though, i've used Microsoft Visual Studio before i like that drag and drop buttons and stuff onto the Windows Forms.. Does things like that exist for Java?

 

[MisterMe]

you can use C# in Mac OS X.

but either way, you'll be able to change languages later if you wish

You should have mentioned the fact that this is part of the Mono 2.4, a clone of .NET, primarily for Unix-like systems. [It also runs on Windows.] However, the MacOS X port of MonoDevelop--which is what the OP needs--is still in early development.

My advice to the OP is that life is too short to volunteer for things he doesn't like. He will learn a lot in his Java course. This is the elective that he should take.