As part of its commitment to academic computer science programs, Microsoft Corp. today announced the delivery of new resources designed to help students and teachers use Visual Studio® .NET 2003. Among the enhancements is the Microsoft® Supplemental User Interface (UI) Library for Visual J#® .NET, which provides much of the functionality described in the Java 2 JFC Swing specification and enables teachers to use existing Swing-based curricula and textbook examples with Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the Microsoft .NET Framework. Teachers who have existing Swing-based source code now can adopt Visual J# .NET with few or no changes required of the source code.

Microsoft also recently released the Microsoft MBS Case Study for Visual J# .NET, a sample application used by the AP Computer Science program in high schools to teach students object-oriented programming techniques. The MBS Case Study makes programming fun and interesting for students by encouraging them to build "fish classes" that are then applied to an aquarium simulation. Visual J# .NET provides full support for the Java-language syntax and Java Development Kit functionality required to teach the AP Computer Science course, which is representative of a college-level introductory computer science class.

"These releases underscore Microsoft's commitment to helping students and teachers use their existing Java-language curriculum with industry-leading development tools such as Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the .NET Framework," said Morris Sim, director of the Academic Developer Group in the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division at Microsoft.