Understanding dotnet is easy ?

Quite often we all hear statements like "I know language X, how hard is it to learn a new technology, I can pick it up in a week". Sure, anyone can learn and write a hello world application in a few hours (sic) :), but building production applications even in a technology that you know is fairly hard. This is evident from the project overrun/failures that we see all around us (some of them have non-techy reasons for failing and they are ignored here ...).

I would be surprised if anyone who was bitten by issues like this (Note: you dont need to use COM to get bitten :) ) or hangs due to thread aborts in the older versions of the CLR or subtle issues with statics and appdomains, or configuration files and appdomains or the really wierd behavior that you can experience with the dotnet loader would make a statement like "I know Java, so dotnet will be a piece of cake !" or vice versa :).

There is a significant cost to learning a new technology well enough (even discounting the innumerable glitches that new technologies come with) to ship something and it is worth considering that cost before you jump on the platform du jour band wagon.