I was around in that era and yes when C# came out it was very obvious that Microsoft had been 'inspired' by the Java syntax ... Java had been the buzzword for the 5 years or so beforehand, like the only language that anyone talked about, so when Microsoft came up with C# it was glaringly obvious where they got the idea from.

On the other hand Java came with the VM ("write once run anywhere" as they used to say) but C# turned that inside out with the Common Langauge Runtime, so you had various languages like C# and VB.Net that compiled to the same bytecode.

The other innovation with Java back in the day was that it came with a huge library/framework of classes that did most of the stuff you would need to do. Similarly Microsoft's .NET library was a copy of that idea, although the frameworks themselves were pretty different.