Well, I think it is hard to predict the future. I'm a final year university student, who has studied and worked with java for the past three years.
However, Microsoft came to my university (in the UK) and gave one of the most impressive demonstrations I have ever seen. Basically the guy used Microsoft Visual Studio.NET to create an XML web service, a gui widget in Visual Basic.NET which talked to it and a wireless application within 15 minutes. He must have typed two lines of code in all, the rest was with wizards and point and click. Although Visual Studio did crash

and the wireless app wouldn't connect

), I have to admit it was extremely cool. I'm building a web app using
servlets and
jsp for my degree, and it took me longer to set up
Tomcat than it did for this guy to make these web services. I don't know if .NET is that impressive a technology, but with an application like Visual Studio.NET I can see how popular it will become. Oh yeah, and UK students and researchers can buy it for $99. Whew!
Richard