Seconded. Go ColdFusion if you have any doubts.
The biggest drawback to ColdFusion is the typelessness and lack of
modularity. The community came up with a programming standard called
FuseBox to help manage it. It works reliably for a small website with
a specific purpose - no more than three developers or so. I think you'd
see maintenance/scalability issues after that.
The advantages to ColdFusion are small learning curve, very rapid
development, fine control, and simplicity. Database connectivity is
very simplified. Shooting yourself in the foot is much more difficult.
CF integrates with COM, Java, MS dlls, and I'd imagine most web
services by now (haven't checked in a while).
I moved from ColdFusion 6.0 to ASPX 2.0. I'm an experienced programmer
with a ton of C++ and Java. So protocols, oop, etc are all well
understood. But Microsoft goes nuts over pragmas, directives, wizards,
and drag-and-drop which is so much Club Microsoft stuff. There is a
big learning curve to learn this BS. And it worsens the more you think
"I want to do this" versus "How does Microsoft want me to do this?"
The first three months I used ASP.NET I wrestled against it.
One more parting shot, VS 2005 is crap. Intellisense isn't real-time.
It lags behind reality by about 2-5 minutes or until the next build.
Nested master pages won't render graphically. Microsoft messes with
the root directory on the internal web server. ASP tags aren't
recognized in a content page when editting unless /the master page is
open/ in the editor. Who knows why. Refactoring is a joke. It takes
me at least five minutes to rename a variable. Most of the time it
breaks.
Side note: Eclipse is the IDE of choice. Brilliant. I haven't tried
it with .NET yet. But I've heard people have had success with it
outside of Java.