Are translation tools like the one Microsoft is providing to convert Java to C# actually used to practical effect by customers, or are they just an elaborate way to demonstrate superiority over one’s competitors and obtain media attention? It seems to me that it would be incredibly difficult to write such a translation tool effectively, even for Java, which is a relatively simple language, at least syntactically. I wonder whether it actually knows about all of the classes in the Java standard class library and properly translates them. Furthermore, if you use any external packages at all, like a third party logging tool, or XML parser, or regular expression library, I would imagine that the wheels fall off completely. I doubt many people write code on projects of any size without using external libraries. I guess the creation is news, of a sort, but rarely are the stories accompanied by analysis into how impractical such tools really are.