Visual Studio is a shell of its former self

Back in 1995, when I bought my first copy of Microsoft Visual Developer Studio, it contained Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual J++, Fortran PowerStation and Visual FoxPro (although this last one wasn't fully integrated yet). Soon after, Visual InterDev was added to the product line.

Fortran was the first to go; through a truly Byzantine series of corporate transactions that product is owned by Intel now. At least it still integrates with Visual Studio 2008.

Then InterDev was dropped. Good riddance; that was a truly crappy product.

Then on January 10, 2007, Microsoft announced it was retiring the Visual J# product (Visual J++'s new face after the Sun lawsuit). Not much of a loss. Since it was not actually an implementation of Java (or even close), I never really saw any reason for it to exist at all.

But today ... HORROR (gasp) !! ... Microsoft announced that they were not going to release another version of FoxPro!!

So that leaves Visual Studio with just Visual Basic, Visual C++ and the new (I guess not so new anymore) Visual C#.