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Ed Burnette
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.NET takes a flying leap

By | January 27, 2007, 1:44pm PST

Summary: With Mainsoft’s Grasshopper 2.0 you can port existing C# based ASP.NET Web applications to the Java universe. A new technology preview just came out, and the product should be finished by March. The Developer edition is free.

In collaboration with the Mono project, Mainsoft has released a new technology preview of Grasshopper 2.0. This technology allows you to use Microsoft Visual Studio to develop ASP.NET Web applications using C#, convert them to pure Java applications, and deploy them on Linux and other Java-enabled platforms. You can even use Visual Studio's debugger to attach to and debug the application remotely.

.NET takes a flying leap

It works by compiling MSIL (the binary output from the C# or VB.NET compilers) into standard Java bytecode. The resulting pure Java deployment packages can be used in any Java EE application server such as Tomcat or JBoss. The Grasshopper plug-in automates the whole process and is fully integrated into Visual Studio.

Due to differences between .NET and Java, there are a few limitations on what .NET code can be supported. For example, you can't use unsafe code or call native Win32 APIs. See the online doc for more details.

Grasshopper is the free "Developer" edition of Visual MainWin for Java EE. Enterprise and Portal editions are also available - see this feature matrix for a comparison. Applications can be validated using the SUN Application Verification Kit (AVK) for the Enterprise, or if you use the non-free editions your applications can also be validated Ready for WebSphere Software. All editions use a mixture of open source (shared with the Mono project) and proprietary software.

The final release is expected to be available by March. For more info and downloads see the Mainsoft Developer Zone.

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Ed Burnette is a software industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience as a programmer, author, and speaker. He has written numerous technical articles and books, most recently "Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform" from the Pragmatic Programmers.

Disclosure

Ed Burnette

Ed Burnette is a Manager of Mobile Development at SAS. However the postings on this site are his own and do not represent the positions, strategies, or opinions of his employer.

Biography

Ed Burnette

Ed Burnette has been hooked on computers ever since he laid eyes on a TRS-80 in the local Radio Shack. Since graduating from NC State University he has programmed everything from serial device drivers and debuggers to web servers. After a delightful break working on commercial video games, Ed reluctantly returned to business software. He currently develops enterprise software for Android phones and tablets.

In his copious spare time, Ed writes and speaks about all kinds of technology and software. His most recent books include the Eclipse IDE Pocket Guide from O'Reilly and Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform from the Pragmatic Programmers.

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Cool, but Why?
rkennel 1st Feb 2007
If you know C#, then you pretty much already know java. Why not just code the app in java or if you want to use C#, run the app on a windows server.
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Nice, but with limitations ...
p_msac@... 27th Jan 2007
I have not studied the product, so take my opinion with a "grain of salt".
I think that I doubt anyone would use this in any real complex project.
And also why to change from Eclipse/NetBeans when they are Free, highly supported and integrated with deployment tools, and in particular Eclipse has Huge Support from a great number of ISV's, and that support is becoming bigger all the time?
It might be very handy for someone making the transition from VS to Eclipse/NetBeans to change from code created in C# to Java.
But it must contain a lot of limitations as the namespaces in C# are a grotesque copy of what Java has to offer.
About the remote debugging ... well ... that must refer to debugging in the Microsoft environment ...


Regards,
Pedro
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Contributr
For Microsoft shops
Ed Burnette 27th Jan 2007
The product is aimed for those already using Visual Studio.NET for web application development. If they have customers who now are asking to host those apps in a Java EE server like JBoss or WebSphere, perhaps to get some benefit of those environments like clustering or low cost, this gives them a way to do that without completely re-engineering the application.

Of course, if you had this requirement (running in a Java EE server) and were starting from scratch, you'd probably just write the app in Java (or another JVM-compatible language) and use a Java IDE.

In Visual Studio, on Windows, you could always single step through an ASP.NET application (in particular the code-behind part) using the debugger. The Mainsoft plug-in allows you to do that even if your app has been converted to bytecode and is running on a Linux machine, still within the Visual Studio IDE.

So, it's not for everybody, but very handy if you need it.
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But, if you are a .NET coder
No_Ax_to_Grind 28th Jan 2007
then it makes perfect sense. Given that Windows devlopers out number all other developers by a factor of hundreds to one this is a very handy addition to the tool chest.
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Contributr
Windows != .NET
Ed Burnette 28th Jan 2007
Plenty of "Windows developers" use Java so this term shouldn't be conflated with ".NET developers". From everything I've read, the number of Java developers is the same or more than the number of .NET developers. Most developers still use Windows as their primary system, though anecdotal evidence shows the penetration of Linux and MacOSX is higher in the developer community than anywhere else.
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Could you clarify please?
p_msac@... 29th Jan 2007
Not that numbers count that much but what exactly do you mean by "Windows Developers".
Is it Developers working on software that runs on Windows?
Or developers working on .Net or VB/ Visual Studio?
Stats from IDC say the biggest and fastest growing developer language is Java, not .Net ..
The number of Java developers is Bigger then the number of .Net developers and keeps on growing faster.
Actually the .Net developers are developers that migrated from ASP and VB ... .Net is not gaining market share.
The number of .Net developers is actually loosing "market share" against Java-based technologies.
Ant this tool that Ed pointed out will help migrate from VS to the Java world.


Regards,
Pedro
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Components?
Voodoo187 30th Jan 2007
It'd be interesting to see how it takes .NET custom components and converts them, if at all. Probably a limitation. Even if it uses JSF (JavaServer Faces), there's a huge difference between a JSF component and a .NET component. Night and day really, but essentially accomplishing nearly the same thing. I'm curious.
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I kind of expected .net to be faster
stevey_d 30th Jan 2007
.net 1.1 wasn't bad, but 2.0 is pretty slow.
Just In time compiler for Java bytecode seems to be quite slow also, but this seems to be an implementation problem more than anything, as GCJ and other java to machine code compilers produce very fast code, and Java programs on cellphone seem to run very fast considering the light hardware.
0 Votes
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Cool, but Why?
rkennel 1st Feb 2007
If you know C#, then you pretty much already know java. Why not just code the app in java or if you want to use C#, run the app on a windows server.

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