Visual J#

~ the obit ~

Sun Microsystems sued Microsoft in the late 1990s over Visual J++, whose Java virtual machine did not pass Sun's compliance tests. The settlement took Microsoft out of the Java business and left it holding a customer base that had written Java-looking code against Microsoft tools and now had nowhere to put it. Visual J# was the exit route: the same syntax and the same habits, compiled to the .NET runtime instead of to Java bytecode. It shipped in July 2002 as an add-on for Visual Studio .NET and was folded into the 2003 and 2005 releases.

It was careful never to claim it was Java. Applet development was gone, with only a wrapper that hosted existing applets as ActiveX objects, and the Java Native Interface was replaced by P/Invoke. Remote method invocation did not come along at all. To make a Java bean behave like a .NET property you annotated the getter with a comment reading @beanproperty and renamed the private field so it differed from the accessor suffix. That kind of detail tells you exactly who the product was for, which was somebody with a working codebase and a deadline rather than somebody picking a language.

The ending was announced before the last release shipped. In January 2007 Microsoft said J# and the Java Language Conversion Assistant were out of future versions of Visual Studio. The same announcement promised one more build for customers who needed a 64-bit runtime, and Visual J# 2.0 Second Edition arrived on 18 May 2007. The copy inside Visual Studio 2005 was supported until 2015 and the redistributable until October 2017.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the new project dialog ~

I was an engineering student in Turkey when Visual Studio 2005 was what the lab machines had, and J# was one of the languages sitting in the New Project dialog next to C# and C++. I never opened it, and nobody I studied with opened it either. The people it was built for were not students: they were companies with Visual J++ source and a reason to stay on Microsoft's runtime, and there were not very many of them by 2005.

~ what a transitional language is ~

Microsoft shipped J# with a conversion assistant attached, which is the clearest statement of intent a product can make. The tool's job was to move your Java project into J#, and J#'s job was to let the result compile until you were ready to rewrite it in C#. A language designed as a ramp has a scheduled end, and the January 2007 memo was that schedule arriving.

C# is where all of this went. Anders Hejlsberg's language had absorbed what Microsoft wanted from Java by 2002 and carried none of the court history, so the J# audience was always expected to arrive there eventually.

~ the support tail ~

The interesting number is the gap. Four and a half years of being a product, then ten years of being an obligation: five of mainstream support and five of extended support on the 2.0 Redistributable Second Edition, running to October 2017 on English language locales. Somewhere in that decade there were production systems compiling Java-shaped source against the CLR, maintained by people who had never been offered a reason to stop.

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