First, some background. Our Department is deciding on whether or not to migrate to ASP.NET or JSP over the next few years. We've already developed a major JSP-based application with mixed success. And I've dabbled (painfully) with JSP/Tomcat/Eclipse while creating a prototype web application. Although it really doesn't help when your Team Leader insists on designing all their webpage layouts in Microsoft Paint rather than...say...Macromedia Dreamweaver.

One of my colleagues used .NET in her previous job, and demonstrated it for us. I was really impressed. There are so many things that would take days for a newbie like me to code in JSP (eg. tabs and pagination) that takes less than a day to develop in .NET.

I read this comment in an article :
Much as I hate to say it, a huge chunk of developers have long since moved to the web and refuse to move back. Most .NET developers are ASP.NET developers, developing for Microsoft's web server. ASP.NET is brilliant; I've been working with web development for ten years and it's really just a generation ahead of everything out there. But it's a server technology, so clients can use any kind of desktop they want. And it runs pretty well under Linux using Mono.
My question to other developers with more experience with .NET - Is it really a generation ahead of anything else out there? And (apart from the obvious), what less-obvious benefits will our Department get if they migrate from ASP/VB6 to .NET?