Mainsoft CEO Yaacov Cohen says Web Services as a way to get to SOA doesn't work. They've been overused and abused.

Mainsoft has released Mainsoft for Java EE 2.0, code that in an earlier avatar was called Visual MainWin for J2EE and lets .NET developers write .NET web and server apps that run on Linux and Java-enabled platforms without rewriting their code or learning new skills. It's been in preview and gone into pilots since last September.

The new rev supports Visual Studio 2005, .NET Framework 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0 controls, role-based security and C# generics.

Cohen says it establishes C# 2.0 and Visual Basic as languages that are fully supported by the Java Virtual Machine.

The company has been working with Mono on Mainsoft for Java EE for the last four years and Mono of course is the open source version of Microsoft's .NET technologies sponsored by Novell.

There's a free Developer Edition, a k a Grasshopper 2.0, designed for individual developers and small group deployments, a project that's collected 20,000 followers; an Enterprise Edition for enterprise developers and multi-CPU deployments; and a Portal Edition to populate Java EE portals like WebSphere Portal with ASP.NET 2.0 applications and services such as SQL 2005 Reporting Services in a tightly integrated front-end SOA.