UPDATE April 2nd 2014: This was an April fools joke. We thank all that shared the joke with us in social media and all other places and made the laugh for the day. Thanks for the hundreds of positive feedback.
When you thought Vaadin 7.2 and 7.3 were on the way, we've been hard at work on a secret project all along. Today we're proud to announce the release of 12 intensive months of work behind the scenes by our R&D department. We at Vaadin always strive to stay on the edge of the wave and having seen the popularity of C# in the past few years, we decided to pull the switch behind the scenes. Vaadin now fully supports C# as the first-class programming language on the server-side as well as on the client-side.
"The largest effort was converting GWT into supporting C#. You can now stay inside Visual Studio, that you've learned to love, and compile to JavaScript and HTML with Microsoft Web Toolkit Framework (aka MSWTF) faster and more conveniently than ever before." says VP of Vaadin.NET R&D Artur Seagull.
This is a huge thing for all developers around the world, you can work in a superior sharp language while developing full-blown Ajax applications. We've even built in support for the <blink> tag and backported support for IE6 mode into Windows 8 through a Webcomponents widget using JS-Interop. Sharepoint server was a natural choice and is as of today the dedicated platform for deploying Vaadin.NET applications. These have been the major requests in the community for the past few years and we're pleased to finally answer the call.
"According to a Gartner market study even JavaScript hackers have always preferred C# to jQuery and now they can finally move to a platform with a future." says the newly appointed .NET evangelist Matti Pehvanen.
We've managed to build in support for all major browsers starting from IE5. The project is still quite new, only used in a handful of Vaadin internal projects so there might still be some stability problems. We've especially had a hard time building support for marginal browsers such as Google Chrome, but are sure to have full support by the end of 2015Q1.
We're also pleased to announce a separate Vaadin.NET Sass compiler, based on the famous Vaadin Sass compiler.
"We looked at C# for a long time but minimizing the compilation time is such an important factor in the in-time request-by-request theme compilation with Sass, that we had to go deeper. We tried C++ but even that wasn't enough so we ended up rewriting it all in pure C to optimize processor floating point usage. They don't call it CSS for nothing, now even I understand where the C in CSS comes from." says Leif Asgard from the Sass swat-team.
Vaadin Visual Studio Enterprise Edition Suite plugin running on Windows XP
What does this mean for you as a Vaadin developer?
Rest assured, you can continue using Vaadin just as before, as soon as you've switched from Java to C#. This is most easily done by getting a license for Visual Studio through Microsoft and doing a little find and replace. We're also planning on releasing a plugin (with fully integrated CRebel support) for Visual Studio early May with a price tag of $5000 per CPU cores per year.
The new Framework will go under the domain Vaadin.net launched today! You will find all the relevant info there so go check it out! At the same time we also modernized the logo to the next level. We used the upcoming Valo-theme's mixin variables to make it un-comprehensibly flat and reduced the roundness to the max. Once you understand flat design, cubism really is the next step and we're excited to lead the way!
The new server-side project goes by the name of Vaadin.NET and is available as of today in GitHub. If you're only interested in the client-side, it works as a full drop-in replacement for both GWT and jQuery under the project MSWTF in GitHub. You can also order it on CD by sending us a PO to our fax. Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments below. Are you as excited as we are?
Satay Nutella is C#O. He likes big words like synergy and convergence and disrupting the technosphere with innovative ideas that literally blow your mind. You can't contact him on twitter or anywhere else – he'll contact you if he needs to.