I was in a similar situation with you a year ago. I am a computer science student, I finished my course well about a month ago. The first two years of my course, I worked with Java, PHP, Oracle, MySQL. It actually landed me on an industrial deployment in Oracle, where I used their ADF, which was based on Java.
In any case, all this made me think about what I wanted to use for my project last year, and without experience in using Microsoft technologies, they began to take risks along this path. I did not know ASP.NET MVC and spent time learning ASP.NET WebForms. I liked the easy development style, drag and drop is a very quick way to develop small sites. However, I also did not like the lack of control that I had, and the simplicity, I did not feel too contested.
Over the course of my last year, I began to research Model View Controller and how it is suitable for web applications. From this I came across ASP.NET MVC and, in my opinion, much better than ASP.NET WebForms. There seems to be a new trend in MVC frameworks for web applications, and this seems to be a hot technology for building web applications.
Now I can say that learning ASP.NET MVC was one of the best things I did. I do not know if you are British, but only two universities in the UK teach .NET. This simplified the work of the graduate, and I stood out from .NET candidates because I was from the Java course, just like you.
The transition from Java to .NET is not particularly difficult, all theories and concepts are the same. Also, ASP.NET MVC is becoming quite popular among enterprises specializing in the Microsoft technology stack. Now this is a completely new learning technology, while young will be an advantage. I finished work when a company rewrites its application from ASP.NET WebForms to MVC, and only I and the senior developer have ever used MVC, which led to a rather large role in the project.
If you're interested, my last yearโs research can be found here , and I have a chapter on ASP.NET WebForms and MVC
My source code is also on my site, but its mainly MVC 1.0 is not 2.0