SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Mainsoft Corporation, the leading cross-platform company, today announced the release of the Grasshopper 2.0 Technology Preview 2, a plug-in to the Microsoft(R) Visual Studio(R) development environment that enables C# developers to write ASP.NET 2.0 Web applications using C# 2.0 and generics and deploy them on Linux and other Java-enabled platforms. Community forums and technical articles that demonstrate how to port existing .NET 2.0 applications to Java are available free to developers who register at http://dev.mainsoft.com/ . More than 17,000 .NET developers have joined Mainsoft's cross-platform community since the site was launched in May 2005.

Mainsoft's 2.0 Technology Preview 2 is the result of Mainsoft's three-year collaboration with Mono, an open source development initiative sponsored by Novell. The initiative is developing an open source multi-platform version of the Microsoft(R) .NET (.NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0) technologies.

Visual Studio Developers, Linux and Cross-Platform .NET

A recent survey conducted by The Code Project, a virtual community of 3.3 million Visual Studio developers, shows 26 percent of Visual Studio developers are using Linux development technologies, compared to 31 percent who reportedly use Visual Basic .NET.

"Most developers come to our Developer Zone with existing .NET 1.1 or .NET 2.0 applications that they want to run on open systems," said Philippe Cohen, VP Products, Mainsoft Corporation. "As many as one third are looking for solutions to complex interoperability in heterogeneous environments. These are the types of challenges that can be resolved in a straightforward manner using cross-platform .NET."

Mainsoft has helped thousands of developers to integrate advanced .NET 1.1, .NET 2.0, and Java technologies into a single, open source deployment:

-- Paolo De Nictolis, a freelance Web developer and technical contributor to MSDN, used advanced .NET 2.0 functionalities, ASP.NET 2.0 controls, and the Grasshopper 2.0 Technology Preview to develop a Web-based accounting application with roles-based security and deployed it to Linux. "It would be rather difficult to achieve such a tight integration between the .NET and Java components if we had resorted to the Web Services as our integration technology." -- Jon Taylor, CEO of Segway Software, said he "resolved an enterprise customer's interoperability challenge so fast that the customer didn't believe we had a working solution until we demonstrated the completed effort." Taylor used Mainsoft's Enterprise Edition to integrate Segway Sales Productivity Suite, written entirely in Microsoft .NET, with an enterprise customer's existing pricing management and configuration system, written in Java. -- Richard Schoen, President and CTO of RJS software, used Mainsoft's Portal Edition to surface WebDocs, a Web-based imaging and document management application, through a portlet on WebSphere Portal. According to Schoen, "Rather than rewriting the VB.NET portlet, which would have taken us about 9 months, we used Mainsoft's software to surface the application in three weeks, and we didn't need to become experts in WebSphere Portal or Java to do it." What's New In the Grasshopper 2.0 Technology Preview

The latest Grasshopper 2.0 Technology Preview enables developers to create Web projects using advanced .NET 2.0 functionalities such as out-of-the box ASP.NET 2.0 authentication and authorization with a pure Java datastore for membership, roles and profiles, as well as ASP.NET 2.0 controls, including master pages, login control, wizard, themes, and data controls such as GridView, and deploy them natively on Tomcat. To support multi-platform deployments, the Technology Preview comes bundled with the IBM Cloudscape database, a highly portable database with a pure Java runtime. Developers can also port existing ASP.NET 2.0 applications to Linux and other Java-enabled platforms. To speed the debugging process, developers can use the Visual Studio 2005 debugger to attach the Web application to Java and control its execution.

Visual Studio Developers and Mono

"We value our partnership with Mainsoft and their significant contributions to Mono," said Miguel de Icaza, Vice President of Developer Platforms, Novell and the leader of the Mono project. "Their expertise in both the .NET development platform and the Open Source environment has been a significant factor in helping Mono pursue our shared goal of promoting cross- platform .NET in the enterprise, much faster than was possible."

Mainsoft's engineering team is contributing to the ongoing development and testing of Mono's ASP.NET 2.0, FTP and Mail, Visual Basic 1.1 and 2.0, ADO.NET, XML, and .NET core class libraries. Grasshopper is a significant "leap" forward in Mainsoft's and Mono's shared objective, to make it easier for .NET developers to write applications for Linux.

About Mainsoft Corporation

Founded in 1993, Mainsoft Corporation, the leading cross-platform company, enables businesses to develop mission-critical applications with Visual Studio software and deploy them natively on J2EE servers as well as Windows, UNIX(R) and Linux(R) operating systems dramatically reducing development costs and time-to-deployment. The company is a first-mover in cross-platform development. Its world-class research and development team has created patented cross-platform products that solve critical problems facing independent software vendors (ISVs) and IT organizations. Many of the world's largest ISVs including Siebel, Computer Associates and IBM Rational, use Mainsoft's products to extend the productivity of Microsoft Visual Studio, deploying more than $1 billion worth of software annually on multiple operating systems. For more information, visit http://www.mainsoft.com/.

NOTE: All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

Press Contact: Jenna Dobkin Director of Marketing Mainsoft Corporation Ph: (415) 652-2185 jennad@mainsoft.com

CONTACT: Jenna Dobkin, Director of Marketing of Mainsoft Corporation,
+1-415-652-2185, or jennad@mainsoft.com

Web site: http://www.mainsoft.com/

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