Question about using Visual J#
 

I'm going to be using Visual Studio 2005 Standard, mostly for work in Visual Basic and Visual C++. I'm aware that Visual J# isn't true Java I guess, but more or less Microsoft's version of it. I was wondering though just for learning purposes can I pick up a book on Java and go through it and enter in the code samples in my Visual J# editor window, and it will still work okay?

No. Why don't you just use Eclipse, Dr. Java, Netbeans, or JCreator? They're all free and work 100% with Java.

To contribute to the above post I would like to add that: As far as I am aware J#, regardless of it's resemblence to Java, is designed to be used in the context of writing applications for portable devices but this does not restrict it to such platforms and it can be used, just as any other .NET language to write applications for any capable Windows OS.

J# and Java do have syntactical differences which would obviously prevent you from compiling Java code with the J# compiler not to mention the classes available are not identical to the ones you would use when writing Java code. Since J# applications run on the .NET platform and use the J# Framework as an intermediate communicator we can safely say that they (the languages) are two totally seperate things.

There is a tool available within VS however (JLCA - Java Language Conversion Assistant) which allows you to convert your Java code to compatible J# code. Also J# can work with Java bytecode meaning you can still access your Java functionality if you have created libraries etc.

JW.