In my own opinion each has advantages, and while I prefer C# for writing mass amounts of concise, elegant code in a short time, Java is definitely preferable when it comes to robust software design. For example, despite their reputation I’ve come to rely on checked exceptions as a powerful mechanism for enforcing reliability on the code level. Other subtle differences, such as having to explicitly declare captured variables as final, can reduce a lot of hard-to-spot bugs. The Java collections and executors framework is also much, much more powerful.

On the other hand C# has a much better type system, and new language versions continually add features to aid robustness and increase productivity. I’m looking forward to preconditions and postconditions, variance rules for type parameters and other goodies. It is an interesting race for sure…