Mobile Code in .NET: A Porting Experience

Abstract

Mobile code systems typically rely on the Java language, since it provides many of the necessary building blocks. Nevertheless, Microsoft recently released the .NET platform, which includes at its core a virtual machine supporting multi-language programming, and a new language called C#. The competition between .NET and Java is evident, and so are the analogies between these two technologies.

From the point of view of code mobility, a natural question to ask is then whether .NET supports mobile code, and how the mechanisms provided compare with those available in Java. This paper aims at providing a preliminary set of answers to this simple question.

The work we report about was not driven by the goal of providing a thorough comparison. Instead, it was driven by the practical need to port an existing toolkit for code mobility written in Java, μCode, to the .NET environment. This approach forced us to verify our mobile code design on a concrete example, rather than just think about the problem in abstract. The resulting software artifact constitutes, to the best of our knowledge, the first implementation of a mobile code system written for .NET. In the paper, we provide an overview of the .NET mechanisms supporting mobile code, show how they are exploited in our port, and discuss similarities and differences with the Java platform.