Mainsoft launches Visual Studio .Net for Linux Developer Program

Mainsoft Corporation has announced the availability of Visual MainWin for J2EE Developer Edition, a.k.a. Grasshopper, a freely available Visual Studio .NET plug-in.

Grasshopper enables individual developers to develop, debug and deploy Web applications and Web services for Windows, Linux and any Java-enabled platform using Visual Studio software, C# and Visual Basic .NET. Grasshopper is designed for individual developers and for small user group deployments. Access to enterprise features such as multi-CPU capabilities and fully-featured J2EE servers, including WebSphere, JBoss and WebLogic, are available in Visual MainWin for J2EE Enterprise Edition.

Mainsoft also announced it has extended its collaboration with Mono, an open-source development community that is developing an open source version of the Microsoft .NET development platform. With Grasshopper, Visual Studio .NET developers can contribute enhancements, class libraries and fixes to Grasshopper's and Mono's shared open source runtime.

According to a recent study by Evans Data Corporation, one in five developers using Visual Studio .NET as their primary IDE have written an application for Linux. The study also indicates that more than half of the Visual Studio .NET developers surveyed have used open source components in their application development.

"Already, cross-platform development is a powerful reality among our ISV customers, who use the high productivity of Visual Studio software to develop enterprise applications once and deploy them on multiple platforms," said Yaacov Cohen, Mainsoft's president and CEO. "Grasshopper encourages wide-spread adoption of Linux development among Visual Studio developers, who can easily move, or 'hop' across Windows, Linux and other Java-enabled platforms."