Visual J# .NET Released

Goalie_Ca writes: "Visual J# .NET was released at the Tech Ed 2002 Europe Developper conference today. Visual J# .NET is not a tool for developing applications intended to run on a Java virtual machine. Applications and services built with Visual J# .NET will run only in the .NET Framework; they will not run on any Java virtual machine. Download it here; Microsoft J# .Net site."

Comments

Here's the answer

[GCP]

J# isn't meant to run on a JVM. It's just one of the .Net family of languages.

All .Net languages are compiled to the same "bytecode" that MS calls MSIL. J# is no exception. It is compiled to MSIL, not to Java bytecode.

Whether you prefer to write your source in Java (using J#), or C#, or VB.Net, or Perl.Net, or whatever, the source gets compiled to the same MSIL.

The MSIL code then runs on the .Net framework in a thing called the "common language runtime", which is similar to a JVM, but designed from the start to *try* to accommodate as wide a range of source languages as possible.

After they become MSIL, they are completely interchangable, regardless of their original source language. You could grab a cool C# utility class off the Web somewhere and use Java "extends" to write a subclass in Java. If you find it easier to parse text with Perl than with Java (who doesn't?), then you could write just the text parser classes in your Java app in Perl.Net.

The idea is that you get to work in a source language that you choose. Unlike the Java world, .Net doesn't limit you to doing everything in a single language. (However, it *does* currently limit you to Windows only, quite unlike Java, but that's changing quickly.

The point of J# is to let Java lovers use Java to create .Net applications. When Ximian's Mono Project is fully up and running (Go Mono!), the MSIL output from J# will become executable on a Linux box. When that happens, a Java programmer who wants to deploy on Linux will suddenly have two excellent class frameworks to choose from: the Java standard and .Net.