Hi!
Some additional thoughts:
I think it’s today hard to start developing web services in java because there are no general support for doing a web server you have to download spring web server, Apache CXR or have some complex web server installed like Glasshfish or Weblogic.
Personally, I think of this as freedom of choice, instead of freedom from choice.
If you want extremely simple, standalone, web services then go for the Restlet framework. If you have a
servlet container, like
Tomcat, then I can recommend Metro or Apache CXF. If you want to develop web service with an application server that is ready out-of-the-box and that has
IDE integration, then go for GlassFish etc etc.
The problem with freedom of choice is that you have to know what you do and spend at least some time to familiarize yourself with the available options.
If you want an easier way, I would suggest using GlassFish and NetBeans - prepared to be used together, availability of tutorials etc from Sun, makes developing web services etc even easier with wizards.
Additionally, the availability of source code for most Java solutions and, not to forget, the community surrounding a lot of projects and this place (with all the kind and helpful people) has helped me on quite some occasions. Can't say that I know a lot about the community around Microsoft products - please inform me.
With this said, I also want to add that I am interested in developing web services etc using Microsoft products if given an oportunity - after all, web services is about interoperability and there is little challenge is obtaining that between Java-only solutions.
Best wishes!