J# to the Rescue

I've always wondered what the purpose of J# was. I mean, Java and C# are quite similar, so I'd suppose that if people (for some weird reason) would prefer to code Java (instead of drinking it), they'd do so purely because they wanted to work within the java environment and the java VM. If they eventually decided to overcome their Microsoft fears and turn to the .NET framework, C# would seem like a natural choice. So it has indeed been puzzling my mind why J# is included with Visual Studio.
But today I found a use for it, and it really saved my day!
The next programming assignment (after the Connect 4 game) in the AI class I'm attending was handed out today and even though the assignment looks fairly interesting (implementation of DPLL algorithm to check satisfiable of Boolean expressions in CNF form) the source code that we are supposed to base our solution on was pure old-fashioned java. Of course, we are free to choose which language to solve the task with, but if we choose anything else than Java we'll have quite a programming task ahead of us, just making the code-base that we're supposed to extend on. After first considering learning java I was happy to remember that there might be another way out :-)
With shaking hands and a heart beating way too fast I started VS2005 and created a J# Class Library project. Then I copied the original source java code into newly created .jsl files with identical file names (copy+paste). As you probably can imagine the excitement was overwhelming when I tried to build for the first, but surprisingly there was only very few compiler errors...
A java HashMapSet that I discovered should be changed to an ArrayList in .NET, a couple of framework methods where Mocca (sorry, Java) used wrong casing, and finally a method that appeared to have been renamed in .NET, and I was good to go.
All that was left to do then, was to create a C# project in the same solution, reference the J#-library and I was good to go - well almost. In order to inherit one of the java-classes and override the methods we're supposed to implement we also needed to reference "vjslib" in our c# project in order to recognize the parameters to the methods we were overriding.

All in all I was very happily surprised to find that J# actually cured my pain.

Now we (me, Thomas and Peter) just need to actually solve the programming assignment we were given :-)