Here is a snippet of the article that may shed some light:

"Visual J++ is not currently in the Visual Studio.Net package," Paul Maritz, vice president of the company's platforms group said. "We have ongoing litigation with Sun (Microsystems), so we can't be innovators" in Java, Maritz said. "But we would like to see Java supported in the '.Net' platform."

The company will ship a Java tool made by software developer Rational in Visual Studio.Net, which is expected to debut later this year. Microsoft plans to hand out test versions of the tools package tomorrow to more than 6,000 developers at a conference here.

This makes it sound like they dropped VJ++ from VS because of the "ongoing litigation with Sun"... but it does sound like Java will likely still be alive in VS. Just not as VJ++.

>It didn't shed any light on the reasons.
>
>>I can only guess at the purpose for this shift, but the article just stated that Microsoft will drop VJ++ from VS, and they hinted the possible reason is the pending lawsuit. You can probably find this article via Craig's link, if you are interested.
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>>>>That is what I heard too - because of the lawsuit with Sun, they have decided to put VJ++ on the back burner, and push C#. I read this in a related article on cnet.
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>>>I don't completely understand this. Is Microsoft afraid that Sun will yank its Java license and doesn't want to invest in a product it might lose?