Mainsoft has a free developer edition of their Visual Mainwin product. This integrates with
VS 2003, and compiles .net code into Java classes, which can then be deployed on
J2EE app servers. This is pretty neat, I can deploy the web application on IIS
and on a J2EE appserver. The installation comes with Tomcat.
Porting a .Net app to J2EE is simple, just right click on the project in VS
2003, and selecte Generate J2EE project. This adds a new project to the
solution, but the source files can only be changed in the original
project. Building the solution compiles the .net app, and the J2EE project. This
also creates the neccessary deployment descriptors for Java. This also creates a
complete package to deploy on a remote app server.
VB.Net 2003 is a pre-requisite for Visual Mainwin, but they plan on removing
this dependancy in future versions. One thing to watch out is that, the source
files of all the projects and the projects they refer to is needed.
For example, in your web application if you add a reference to a component,
the J2EE project will not compile because it cannot generate the java libraries
for the component. So there should be an equivalent java library (jar file) or
the source code should be there to create it.
I've so far done some simple web applications with it, and it works well.
Now because.Net apps can be deployed on other platforms, here is an article
on best practices
http://linux.sys-con.com/read/117910.htm