Seminar: Multi-language interoperability: the experience of Eiffel on .NET
Level: Intermediate
One of the advertised benefits of .NET is the support for multiple languages. One of the most extensive efforts to implement non-Microsoft compilers on .NET has been Eiffel for .NET, pre-released, as part of Microsoft's "Project 7", at the same time as the original version of .NET. Six years later, Eiffel for .NET is a commercial product used in mission-critical applications, with both a native Eiffel implementation and an add-on to Visual Studio .NET (Eiffel Envision). This talks assesses the experience of adapting a commercial technology to .NET through its language interoperability mechanisms; it describes the challenges (such as multiple inheritance, ASP.NET, CLS compliance, verifiability with a different type system) and the solutions retained.
Level: Intermediate
One of the advertised benefits of .NET is the support for multiple languages. One of the most extensive efforts to implement non-Microsoft compilers on .NET has been Eiffel for .NET, pre-released, as part of Microsoft's "Project 7", at the same time as the original version of .NET. Six years later, Eiffel for .NET is a commercial product used in mission-critical applications, with both a native Eiffel implementation and an add-on to Visual Studio .NET (Eiffel Envision). This talks assesses the experience of adapting a commercial technology to .NET through its language interoperability mechanisms; it describes the challenges (such as multiple inheritance, ASP.NET, CLS compliance, verifiability with a different type system) and the solutions retained.
