Many people had been inquiring how they can use their existing .NET skills to develop applications for Linux. Mono was what got people excited but I have seen all the interest and enthusiasm recede as soon as people get a glimpse of how they can go about developing applications using Mono. I believe its primarily because most .NET developers are Windows users and don't have enough Linux skills to get started on Mono.
Enter Grasshoper, the Visual Studio .NET IDE for Linux. You DO NOT actually have to install Linux on your machine to get started; you would still be developing using C# or VB.NET in your VS.NET Development Environment installed on the Windows platform. The download comes bundled with Tomcat and the PostgreSQL 8.0 database. A separate download on the Grasshopper site is LIW or Linux Inside Windows, to allow you to build and test web applications in a Linux virtual environment. Please note that you need to have both, C# and VB.NET installed with your VS.NET 2003 to install Grasshopper. Although J# installation is also required, you can proceed with the installation and install J# support later.
Once installed, Grasshopper would add a VS.NET add-in to the Microsoft Development Environment (MDE), called Visual MainWin. Remember, to create a new project, the Tomcat server would need to be started. All other things remain the same. When you run the project, it would run on the localhost:8080 address as opposed localhost for normal .NET web apps. Additionally, if you right-click a project in the Solution Explorer, the popup menu would have an item 'Generate J2EE Project'.
Now I come to the really cool part; MainSoft Corp, the company that created Grasshopper aims to release a version for Whidbey when VS 2005 is released. Apart from supporting ASP.NET 2.0, the Whidbey version would include Web Parts mapping to Java Specification Request (JSR) 168, Generics, Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.5 Support, and Web Service-Security (WS-Security) + additional WS standards; means all the cool things that were available only to ASP.NET implementations would now be available to J2EE implementations as well. And maybe, just maybe, this could be a good start for J# as non-.NET developers (Java Developers in particular) would be inclined to use Visual MainWin and J# using the VS.NET IDE.
I would recommend .NET developers to try it out NOW! Core.NET and INETA Pakistan would certainly be conducting a UG event on this technology in the coming weeks.
Adnan Farooq Hashmi,
MVP (Windows SDK),
User Group Leader - Core.NET (http://coredotnet.blogspot.com)
Chair Infrastructure Committee - INETA Pakistan
Member INETA Speaker's Bureau