Grasshopper 2.0, Wow!

While perusing a few websites last week I enountered an article that piqued my interest at Internetnews.com, "Mainsoft Brings ASP.NET 2.0 to Linux". What the article really covered was the Mainsoft Grasshopper 2.0 product announced 6/6/2007 which lets you build your ASP.NET 2.0/C# or VB web application and targett for deployment on a Java/J2EE servlet container or portal.

I have been spending the past month working with the .NET 2.0/3.0 framework and have had the opportunity to test Grasshopper 2.0 using VS2005. The early verdict is, 'wow'! This is truly an accomplishment. The Mainsoft team has created a Visual Studio 2005 extension that converts Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) bytecode to Java bytecode from a C# or VB ASP.NET 2.0 web application. It actually works as advertised. Grasshopper 2.0 fully supports .NET 2.0. The resulting product is a fully compliant Java .WAR that deploys to Tomcat-5.5 as you would expect.

Mainsoft provides a free Developer Version of Grasshopper 2.0 which I used. It requires an activiation key you must get from their website. Installation into VS2005 was flawless as long as you have VS2005 with SP1 installed. The Mainsoft tutorials are easy to follow. If you know how to build an ASP.NET 2.0 web app using VS2005 then using Grasshopper 2.0 is seamless. You just use your existing C# or VB skills in VS2005. You do not need to know Java in order to use it. That is intent of the product.

The Mainsoft online documentation, FAQs and tutorials are all decent for experienced developers. In addition to the Developer version there is the portal and enterprise versions which add additional features. The Mainsoft website provides a clear explanation of each version's features.

Now what would really be cool is Mainsoft Grasshopper supporting SharpDevelop. SharpDevelop is the best open source IDE for .NET that I have seen.