Grasshopper from Mainsoft allows Microsoft Visual Studio developers to create Linux applications in their familiar IDE.
Mainsoft Corp. Tuesday announced a program and a new tool for Visual Studio .Net developers to use their familiar tool set to write applications for Linux.
The San Jose, Calif., company announced its Visual Studio .Net for Linux Developer Program as well as its new Visual MainWin for J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) Developer Edition tool, code-named Grasshopper.
Yaacov Cohen, Mainsoft's president and chief executive, said Grasshopper is a free Visual Studio .Net plug-in for Visual Studio developers to use to create applications for Linux.
Indeed, Mainsoft tasked Evans Data Corp. to conduct a survey, which found that 22 percent of developers using Visual Studio .Net had written or attempted to write an application for Linux in the last year, Cohen said. The survey also revealed that more than half of the Visual Studio .Net developers surveyed said they have used open-source components in the past.
Cohen said Grasshopper is based on Mono, the open-source project for delivering a full implementation of .Net for Linux.
