Microsoft are offering a 60 day trial
of Visual Studio.NET. Mine should be arriving early next week.

What I’m most interested in trying is the java
language conversion assistant plugin. Although why they felt the need to
make it require VS .NET is beyond me. A stand-alone conversion tool makes far
more sense from the perspective of persuading java developers to at least
evaluate .NET.

Note that I’m not trying to evangelise either platform here. Language is a
tool. Java is top of the heap today. It won’t always be so. I don’t know if
.NET is the thing that will topple java, I also don’t know whether it isn’t.
Time will tell.