It was very similar, at least based on what little I knew of Java. Most of the devs, including myself on that project were coming from classic ASP / COM background so it was a very new way to do things. The project was initially proposed to use the ASP/COM architecture and Accenture switched to .NET about a month into the project start (during the design phase). I don't know if that was planned or MS pressured them once they became aware of it. It was a high profile project at the time so I'm sure there were plenty of politics happening in the background that those of us on the dev side weren't aware of.
