When I took computer science in high school a couple of years ago, my teacher was able to secure free visual studio because the school was part of some MSDN Academic Alliance. We learned J# out of Java books and then moved to C# the next year. The languages are extremely similar and can easily be learned either direction.
One cool thing about C# is that when you do things like web services, you can write a web service using C# and then write clients for it using VB or something else like that. All the languages under the Visual Studio.NET can communicate, which makes it really nice to learn. If you're future company has an existin app that it doesn't want to scrap, you can write code that uses it in whatever.NET language you want.
Also, I think the future is going to be in mobile technology, PDA's and smart phones. C# is amazing for writing your own apps on those..NET even has built in support for PDA and phone emulation so you can test you're projects. To compile them onto the device itself, just sync and compile. If you want to learn mobile programming, learn C#.
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When I took computer science in high school a couple of years ago, my teacher was able to secure free visual studio because the school was part of some MSDN Academic Alliance. We learned J# out of Java books and then moved to C# the next year. The languages are extremely similar and can easily be learned either direction. One cool thing about C# is that when you do things like web services, you can write a web service using C# and then write clients for it using VB or something else like that. All the languages under the Visual Studio .NET can communicate, which makes it really nice to learn. If you're future company has an existin app that it doesn't want to scrap, you can write code that uses it in whatever .NET language you want.
Also, I think the future is going to be in mobile technology, PDA's and smart phones. C# is amazing for writing your own apps on those. .NET even has built in support for PDA and phone emulation so you can test you're projects. To compile them onto the device itself, just sync and compile. If you want to learn mobile programming, learn C#.