Today I managed to convert some of my ASP.NET sample code written in VB.NET into Eiffel. There are a few problems with using Eiffel for ASP.NET for web applications. First, it takes a ridiculously long time to compile, even longer than usual. I’m not sure this would be acceptable in a commercial web application. Second, the .NET member names do not map to Eiffel identifiers. So you have to use a utility program to figure out how to refererence every .NET class, property, and method. For example, System.Environment.GetLogicalDrives() needs to be referenced as {ENVIRONMENT}.get_logical_drives(). The utility progam takes about 10 minutes to search the assemblies. Then you need to figure out what kind of data type is necessary to get the list of logical drives. Apparently they are so particular about naming conventions that they had to rename every property and method to use lowercase letters and underscores in the Eiffel style!
Actually I’m delighted with these difficulties. They will serve to discourage other programmers from learning Eiffel for ASP.NET and that will keep my projects from being outsourced to India.
