I’ll be presenting a 3 hour tutorial at the upcoming Agile Practices Conference in December on .NET and Java, the interop gap and various solutions to interoperate between them. Grasshopper will also be introduced as well as other solutions such as Codemesh. Here’s the abstract:

Java and .NET - Bridging the Interop Gap

Many development shops have huge investments in Java, .NET, or both. When it’s time to get programs in one language talking with programs in another, or even being fully deployed in a foreign environment, what options do you have? How do you make sure your programming language skills, along with the investment that gave you those skills, aren’t  lost when trying to target another platform or re-use existing code instead of rewriting it?  Roy Osherove will present various approaches to interoperability between .NET and Java. These approaches include: cross compilation, single-sourced applications, cross language interoperability, JNI, SOAP and web services, and architectural patterns. Roy will also demonstrate tools such as CodeMesh, Mainsoft Grasshopper, Janet, JNBridge and more.

Also, I’ll be  presenting there on:

As one of the people who really pushed for a better integration story with 3rd party addins such as Resharper, I’m delighted to report that Service Pack 1 for Mainsoft Grasshopper is now available to download. Here’s the official quote:

Mainsoft today announced the availability of Service Pack 1 for Mainsoft for Java EE 2.0, which introduces several improvements, primarily in the Portal Edition features. Additional improvements such as improved integration of Mainsoft for Java EE with 3rd parties Visual Studio add-ins, including JetBrains ReSharper, are included in this Service Pack. Read the Service Pack 1 Release Notes for more details.

Here’s the list of fixes and additions from the release notes:

For the Portal Edition:

• Improved the build performance of portal applications.
• Improved the runtime performance of portal applications.
• Fixed several important defects, among them:
  • 8682: Browser refresh initiating a post operation causes exception in portlet.
  • 8689: Calling Response.Redirect with an external URL fails.
  • 8691: Transferring parameters between the processAction and render phases fails.
  • 8694: Wrong handling of post-back data in re-render situations.
  • 8699: Wrong ViewState loaded in portlet when switching between portlet modes.
  • 8777: IsUserInRole does not work in servlet context in Portal 6.0.1.0.
  • 8794: Remove non-pure Java implementation of GetEnvironmentVariable; GetEnvironmentVariable is no longer supported in Java 1.4 (and returns null).
  • 8795: Exception in FileUpload control when Process Action property is set to True.

For all Mainsoft editions:

• Improved integration of Mainsoft for Java EE with 3rd party Visual Studio add-ins, including JetBrains ReSharper 2.5 and 3.0.1, and Developer Express Refactor!^™ Pro.
• Added Mainsoft Framework class library reference to the documentation.
• Fixed several important defects, among them:
  • 8698: Cannot NTLM-authenticate with IIS7-based servers.
  • 8700: Cannot consume Web service with TypedDataTable parameter.
  • 8763: java.lang.VerifyError in specific rare usage of generics.
  • 8766: Failed to read and write profile properties inside a property group.
  • 8786: Failed to catch a generic object.
  • 8970: SoapException/Fault does not deserialize detail field (expects namespace).

The development division here has been doing some really hard work to get this one out there, and it’s was a blast looking in and seeing how it all comes together. Congratulations!