C#: first impressions

I've started studying C# as I'll soon start a project in this language. It's similar to Java, so I'm not doing a giant effort; I like it, it's much better that VB, and Microsoft is offering a free (of charge, not free the GPL-way!!) development environment, for home and study purpose; I'll soon inquiry which are the limitations of this tool. But what I was thinking while reading some manuals is that Sun and Java are surely pointing in the right direction, if MS is going after, and C# is the “Microsoft's version of Java”; but now Java has a great advantage: it has been released under open source! And runs very well on a variety of platforms. But C# is somehow enhanced from J++, and it has some features borrowed from C++ (something I've actually missed a lot, programming in Java):

• Delegates (from C++'s function pointers)
• Stack based structures (in Java every object is heap based, while in C++ you have full freedom but you lack the garbage collector)
• Properties (getter/setter)

What I'm not sure of its goodness is the lack of checked exception, which guarantees in Java a better software robustness; I'll see soon in real world projects if this will be penalizing. In the next days I will start studying the .NET library, and I will start using the IDE.