One question I have is: since you are now comfortable with .Net, would development cycles be comparable between the two for the same application?

For me, they're similar. I'm extremely component-oriented, and have spent much of the last 2 years developing a pretty rich set of reusable UI, database, reporting, and connectivity components in .NET (some of which I've described in my articles). Some of the developers I've worked with on projects have been able to leverage some of these components, which has cut down on their development time.

Kevin