Of course, .NET and web wervices are different things. Web services can
be implemented nicely in Java if desired, but the .NET framework relies
on proprietary technologies as you have described here. What is
unfortunate is that technologies such as XML, SOAP and even HTTP tend
to be inappropriately
.NET is an application framework Microsoft is using against JAVA they are
similar in what they can do but for now the only MS supported runtime is
written for MS Win2K and XP. There also is a way to write a program in .NET
and to compile to JAVA byte codes so potentially you could do this and still