When a company as Java-centric as Wily Technology launches its first .NET solution, the software development world takes notice. Now as a part of CA, Wily has just GA'd its flagship Introscope tool for .NET, and one of the reasons it has done so is that worldwide .NET adoption among professional developers is up 10% from last year to 43% (Internal Microsoft DevTracker survey, FY2005).

What the Wily move signifies is not so much the ascendance of .NET but the arrival of something much bigger: The Introscope for .NET announcement mirrors the biggest change in the i-Technology landscape of recent years, namely the increasing importance of the race toward what inevitably gets called The Heterogeneous Zone.

As more large IT shops develop .NET applications alongside Java EE applications, there's been a steadily increasing need to be able to manage both flavors of enterprise apps side-by-side. Whether the issue is performance, reliability, scalability, or security, what IT staff need is to be able to correlate Java and .NET environments and ensure they have again, using the Introscope tool as an example - a single, comprehensive view of application performance across the enterprise.

Maybe .NET will (or should) feature in Adobe's plans, too, as its flagship Flex development tool doesn't yet exist in a Flash version, even though there is clearly a demand, a demand currently being met by the development team at Midnight Coders.

CA, Adobe....these are not small companies, but giants. As .NET Developer's Journal's own Interop Editor, Laurence Moroney, is always reminding us, .NET is now simply a part of the landscape. Moroney, the director of Technology Evangelism at Mainsoft, is the author of several books on .NET and Web services, as well as several dozen articles that span the i-Technology realm.

"As technology evolves," Moroney says, "a company that is vested in a particular strategy may have many reasons for wanting to change it. For example, companies that don't like the complexity of Java EE (formerly J2EE) development may be seduced by the relative simplicity of .NET and move new product development to the Microsoft platform."

Platform unification, where .NET Framework-based applications are re-hosted on Java EE, or vice versa, is the new normality. Wily knows it, and so - it seems - does an increasing number of major players.