What's odd is that here in the UK it's C# dominating the enterprise landscape. Or at least that's the impression I've always got from the jobs mentioned to me and the developers I've met. I've met PHP, C#, Python, Rails devs but never a Java developer.
The thing about .Net not being awesome compared to Java, it wasn't but that's not true any more, .Net is awesome compared to Java. There's a hell of a team behind the C# language at the moment and they're about 3-4 years ahead of Java in terms of new language features.
Not that I've any delusions about .Net coming to dominate in the web space, but it's more likely than Java imo which looks old now when I read it, though admittedly I don't keep up on it that well.
I worked on a major financial application that had a consumer front end written in share point... it was horrific... easily the worst thing I had seen in 15 years of developing.
The guys that put it together created a situation where there multiple front ends to one database. Each front end generated GUIDs and rammed them into the shared database. My work was to fix the sync'ing problem derived from this.
Most poeple I know refer to it as scare point now, as it scares most developers ;)
That depends on the country. In the Balkans for example, there are more .NET than Java developers, though both of them are in high numbers. The thing is, a lot of students after graduating are trying to get a job as a .NET developer thinking that it's easier, and after that they stick to that job.
And the second sentence, I have to disagree with you. I can't find the link right now (when I find i'll give you another reply), but there was report on USA's most wanted ICT jobs for 2010, and it was sorted per regions in Top 5 format, and the common 3 out of 5 everywhere were: Java, SAP, Oracle. .NET was 4rd or 5th almost on all of them. Second, there are more big companies with Java departments than with .NET departments (and some of them have both).
In my experience C# the language is much better than Java the language, but the .NET ecosystem doesn't even close to Java's ecosystem of both open source and proprietary libraries and frameworks. There's been too many times where I had to write my own stuff for C#, where in Java it'd already be mature, fully tested, and free to use right away.
I think the actual reason is not because of .NET awesomeness, Companies in UK have always invested in Microsoft technologies. I remember back in early 2000s, UK was the only place with a great demand for VB developers. and majority of the current work being advertised, involve rewriting the existing VB applications in C#.
Not from what I've seen. There are tons of Java jobs. There's good reason for that. I can run Java apps on any OS. That's pretty important. It runs fast these days. Eclipse totally rocks and most if not all of what you need is totally free in the Eclipse world.
The thing about .Net not being awesome compared to Java, it wasn't but that's not true any more, .Net is awesome compared to Java. There's a hell of a team behind the C# language at the moment and they're about 3-4 years ahead of Java in terms of new language features.
Not that I've any delusions about .Net coming to dominate in the web space, but it's more likely than Java imo which looks old now when I read it, though admittedly I don't keep up on it that well.