Microsoft's open source IronRuby and IronPython projects are shrouded in a dubious future as the last of the full-time IronRuby developers departed the company last month.

Microsoft is gearing up to release a version of its Visual Studio integrated developer environment that it promises will be easy enough for even business managers to use.

Microsoft Tuesday said it will deepen ties between its Visual Studio development tools and the secure applications development processes first developed inside the company and now available to outsiders.

Microsoft’s next major release of Visual Studio, version 2010, will be the most radical overhaul of the product thus far with support for Web browser-like extensions, source code collaboration, application lifecycle management, and the open source JQuery among others.

As promised, Microsoft today patched six vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer (IE) and Visual Studio with the first "out-of-cycle" update since it plugged a hole last October that the Conficker worm later used to run rampant.