What happened to Project Volta?

Question

And what exactly is it?

The only MS page I could find says its temporarily offline, however that was almost a year ago: http://livelabs.com/blog/volta-offline/

Answer 1

Volta was able to compile MSIL code into any appropriate endpoint. The idea was to write your logic in MSIL (ie. VB.Net, C#) and to compile it into the technology most appropriate for the tier it was being used on. So for example, it would compile to SQL in the data tier, regular CLR in the middle tier and Silverlight in the web tier.

Since Volta was a technology preview, there was no guarantee that it would ever be released. It looks like they have pulled the plug on the project - they say temporarily, but it has been over a year now.

One of Volta's abilities was to compile C# code into JavaScript. If this is what you are after, there is a similar project available called Script#, developed by Nikhil Kothari of the .NET Developer Platform group.

Answer 2

The idea behind Volta, from what I understood from the announcements back in 2007, was that you develop your web application in .Net (server side), and Volta translates the .Net code (MSIL) into pure Javascript, if the client did not have .Net installed. Otherwise it would use the MSIL code and execute it in the client's .Net environment.

The execution of local .Net code is opposed to GWT, which only generates Javascript.

Answer 3

Latest from Eric Meijer and the Cloud Programability Team http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Erik-Meijer-and-Team-Cloud-Data-Programmability-Connecting-the-Distributed-Dots/