Visual Studio.NET VS. Coldfusion

So i was talking to a programmer i met today over lunch and he told me i should learn visual studio. Net. When i asked him what that can do that Coldfusion cannot he said a series of things that i know Coldfusion CAN do. So the question arises what can Visual Studio.Net do that Coldfusion CANNOT? Is it worth the time to learn?

-Alas

Ps. there was 1 exception supposedly Visual Studio can make standalone applications that dont require the internet...are there anymore?

well to answer your question in short, (and im not using correct terming here) .NET is a "backbone" language, what that means its like php where it doesnt need to go through an actual server to translate the language into actual code. now cold fusion is basically paraphrased backbone code that gets translated by the cf server into real code, i think its java based.

there really is nothing cf cannot do that .NET or any other language can, all you need to do is make custom tags that will perform that action that you want. and thats it.

Now VB script can make standalone apps but ive never heard of .NET being able to...

[QUOTE=Alas] Is it worth the time to learn?

-Alas

Go to this page and see why you should learn CFMX.
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/mx/coldfusion/articles/petmarket.html

_____Below is a snippet from that webpage______
Basically a few developers created the same application and here a few stats comparing the languages ability to streamline development......

The full Pet Market application consists of fewer than 20 ColdFusion templates (CFML pages and CFCs) with a total of about 1,500 lines of code. To put that into perspective, the Microsoft .NET Pet Shop contains 3,484 lines and the Java Pet Store has a staggering 14,273 lines of code!


____do you want to write 1,984 less lines of code ? I do and this example shows how

This argument is really between .NET and J2EE...ASP.NET uses the .NET platform, and CFMX uses the J2EE platform. Both platforms are very capable and learning Java or C# for example would both be very good ideas because they'll give you a firm foundation in object oriented programming. In today's market, not knowing OO is basically career suicide.

I agree with kiteless. Choosing whether to use .NET or ColdFusion is a programmer's preference. Personally I prefer ColdFusion. Before switching to ColdFusion, I have played around with C, C++, VB .Net, Java and a bit of C#; yet, I find CFMX very easy and straight foward. By this I mean, the fact that ColdFusion uses J2EE makes it easy to design and implement application for your site by calling Java objects directly from your ColdFusion pages.
machito