lol good call, I didn't even think about that and its how I make my living. C# is java in .net clothing at the end of the day. .net apps scale pretty well too.
C# 3.0 has closures, expression trees, LINQ, and other features that make it much more expressive than Java in my mind.
If you think in terms of map, fold, and filter, you'll be right at home in C#/VB.NET (they're just called Select/Aggregate/Where instead to be familiar to people whose background is SQL and not functional programming). Java, on the other hand, is agonizing to me.
honestly, I was pointing to the webcast more than the framework, webcasts are a great educational tools for new comers.
MSDN contain mountains of webcast on everything, the educational value is huge. I wish more webcast existed for Java, Groovy, Javascript, Perl, Grails, Catalyst, Spring framework!
The soup to nuts series covers everything, similarly other webcast series, the idea is simple and very effective, you will spend your first 10 or so hours looking as vidoes and presentations, next you can move to books and online forums and blogs
After he finishes these webcast, moving to RoR will be a much simpler road, even when RoR is a different framework
Agreed, you have to start somewhere and ASP.NET works straight out of the box. After a while you might want to take a look under the hood and see just what .NET is generating and that might introduce you to some of the alternatives to just straight .NET - but you will be doing that with a lot more knowledge.
Hey - if you disagree with my post feel free to post a reply making your point. A downmod is just childish.
You might not like it but ASP.NET is a popular and extremely effective environment for building interactive web applications. I personally use a variety of different tools to build web apps and .NET ranks with them.
But then you have to contend with IIS, more expensive hosting, a smaller pool of knowledgable people on the subject of windows hosting. Not to mention the less reliable operating system/webserver.
OK I guess this could just turn into a flame war, but I just don't see why you would choose ms for web development, instead of all the free tools with great communities.