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

Re:finally

[Mr. Piddle]

From what I have seen in the business world, the big hurdle holding many companies back from upgrading to .NET is the cost of porting all of the legacy Java code to the new application framework. J# gives real customers a low-cost upgrade path that won't break the bank or the developers' backs.

1) Java is not "legacy."

2) There is no such thing as a "low-cost" upgrade to .NET. Once you adopt .NET, you will be paying through the nose to Microsoft (in more ways than just paying with money). Anyone who sees .NET as anything other than a high-risk development platform is fooling themselves.

Now that Sun is being given some real competition in the virtual machine market, maybe we'll see some genuine innovation.

.NET provides minimal innovation over anything that has come before it. Many flavors of the same language, established virtual machine ideas, one proprietary platform. .NET is just another Microsoft product no different, in principle, than all the others.

In other news...

[Dr. Bent]

Microsoft released a new product today named BuggyWhip.NET, which they say will become the industry standard in "Horse Motivation Technology". A Microsoft spokesman was quoted as saying that the motivation behind this release was to prevent Visual J#.NET from becoming the most useless thing on the face of the earth.

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.