Developers using Microsoft's popular Visual Studio .Net software engineering suite were today offered a plug-in that allows them to code web applications for Linux.

Referred to as Grasshopper, the freely available Visual MainWin for J2EE Developer Edition is designed to link Visual Studio development to Linux and J2EE server deployments.

Grasshopper was designed by Mainsoft and is claimed to be the first Visual Studio-based IDE for Linux.

It enables developers to develop, debug and deploy web applications and web services for Windows, Linux and any Java-enabled platform using Visual Studio software, C# and Visual Basic .Net. The offering is aimed at individual developers and small user group deployments.

Access to enterprise features such as multi-CPU capabilities and fully-featured J2EE servers, including WebSphere, JBoss and WebLogic, are available in Mainsoft's Visual MainWin for J2EE Enterprise Edition.

Grasshopper is the result of Mainsoft's two-year collaboration with Mono, an open source development community working on an open source version of the Microsoft .Net development platform.

With Grasshopper, Visual Studio .Net developers can contribute enhancements, class libraries and fixes to Grasshopper's and Mono's shared open source runtime.

According to a recent study by Evans Data Corporation, more than a quarter of European developers using Visual Studio .Net as their primary development environment have written an application for Linux, and more than a third are likely to write a Linux application next year.

The study also indicated that two thirds of the Visual Studio .Net developers surveyed have used open source components in their application development.

"Many ISVs use the high productivity of Visual Studio to quickly bring commercial applications to market, and then pay a steadily increasing price because they offer Windows-only deployments," said Yaacov Cohen, president and chief executive at Mainsoft.

"We are seeing market leaders turn to Mainsoft to deliver the best of both worlds: the high productivity of Visual Studio and multiple deployments on J2EE application servers, as well as Windows and Linux deployments."