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Microsoft updates Visual Studio roadmap, drops J# support

Martin LaMonica Former Staff writer, CNET News
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT publication InfoWorld.
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Martin LaMonica

Microsoft has put dates on the anticipated future releases of its Visual Studio product line and said that it will drop support for the J# language in future releases.

Earlier this week, it published an updated roadmap for Visual Studio Orcas, which will go into beta in the second quarter this year with a second beta planned mid year. Company executives describe Orcas as a tool optimized for building Windows Vista applications.

The follow-on to Visual Studio Team System is code named Rosario, the company's application lifecycle management tools suite which will add enhancements for IT project management.

Separately, Microsoft earlier this year said it will retire its support of the J# language and Java Language Conversion Assistant tool in future versions of Visual Studio.

"Since customers have told us that the existing J# feature set largely meets their needs and usage of J# is declining, Microsoft is retiring the Visual J# product and Java Language Conversion Assistant tool to better allocate resources for other customer requirements," according to a Microsoft notice, spotted by InfoWorld.