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."

I don't get it...

[rickms]

It's designed to run on a Java Virtual Machine but will only work on the .Net Framework.... This sounds absurd, why not just use Java? I'll admit I'm not to informed on the whole '.NET' strategy (frankly, don't care), but can someone educate me on the possible use of J#?

Rick

Re:Different approaches...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is relevant that it is a Unix-style operating system. Much easier to port to a Unix from another Unix, than from Windows.

They chose *BSD, and then chose the most popular BSD from Open, Net and Free. What is wrong with that?

Re:Market-speak

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that it is Open Source is a huge step forward for Microsoft in working with the open source community. You slate it as being FreeBSD only - but really, they just picked the most popular of the *BSDs. It makes sense to go for BSD, as there are too many other Linux platforms to work on. And it makes sense to go for the most popular (even if 'BSD is dying', hehe :-) )

The important thing is that there is a *Unix* port of it, available as Open Source. This is a very good move all round.

Yes, but I can't do anything useful with it. I can't port it to Linux, or Solaris. That's what I mean by phony open source. What's the point of having the source, if you can't do anything but read it? Who cares?

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.

Re:Actually an Improvement

[Tomah4wk]

You will find the VMs are actually very fast. It is the java compilers (except IBM's and possibly others) that produce basically no optimisation. This could be fixed for sun by a cometent programmer in a week, but they wont do it, nor will they hire CS students like me to do it for them real cheap.

Existing J++ Base

[ctk76]

It's my understanding that Microsoft isn't trying to push J# as a new platform, but rather to support small existing J++ users to migrate to .Net.