I have been a hands-on developer for my entire career and love working with code. I have always resented the team lead who has little or no expertise regarding a particular technology and yet insists on a certain implementation.
Now I find myself on the other side of the looking glass. I am the lead developer of a fat client to be implemented in C#, however my expertise is in building Java web applications. While I know that I can leverage design patterns and OO paradigms in any language, I am lost when it comes to coding standards, project life cycle tools and release/distribution procedures. I have no doubt that I can pick up the basics within a month or two, but there are certain experiences one can only gather with time.
What should I do, and how do I avoid becoming the project lead that I hated when I was developing?