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His entry into this thread, #17, said:

Absolutely correct. I had an application that took me eight weeks to code and test in ASP.
Converting it to ASP.NET took eight hours.

What you apparently picked up on that I missed was that this claim was not accurate, in fact highly misleading.

I was, apparently, wrong in taking this statement at face value. You correctly surmised he only mean the converted *part* of it to .NET, not the business logic, which remained in stored procs.

Don't take it so hard. The last product I worked on was a VB/ ASP front end and a SQL backend, we even funneled reports out through Word and Excel (though directly not via Access). I have 4 years of experience with almost the exact same architecture setup. I know some of the implications of that architecture intuitively.

As for which architecture is better we've had that arguement before, I don't think it's so cut and dry. There are a lot of things that contribute to architecture decisions, not all of which are based on universal truths. Jeeves said he was the only person in the company that knew Java, that right there is a good reason not to use it, only having one of your developers able to write/ maintain the code is always a bad decision in a corporate setting, you hire multiple developers for a reason. If they really wanted to do it in Java that would have meant delaying the project long enough to hire a couple more Java guys, given how the hiring process generally runs in software pushing back an 8 week project to make 2 or 3 hires is just dumb.

As for whether or not .Net is ready for primetime I think the whitepaper list from MS answers that question. Will it have some issues because it's new? Sure. That's why they call it the bleeding edge. But the only way issues get ironed out is for the product to be used, if everybody waited until it got smoothed out there'd be no revenue in it for MS in the early stages and therefore no reason to iron out the issues. Those that chose to work in it know coming in there will be some issues they'll have to work around and they go for it. But just because there are some issues doesn't mean it's not ready for primetime, just means there are issues. Companies are going to have to make their decisions accordingly and if we're not involved in the process it's not our place to "correct" them. Everybody that chooses .Net is going to chooses it for a reason, everybody that chooses Java is going to choose it for a reason. Their profitability will tell us if their reasoning was correct.