Microsoft Joins Eclipse Foundation -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Joins Eclipse Foundation

Announced at EclipseCon: More tools and support for open source Eclipse platform coming in Microsoft's Azure and Visual Studio tools.

By Michael Domingo
03/08/2016

Microsoft's participation at this week's EclipseCon is perhaps the perfect time for the company to announce its formal membership with the Eclipse Foundation. Microsoft is now a Solution Member, and that "enables us to collaborate more closely with the Eclipse community, deliver a great set of tools and services for all development teams, and continuously improve our cloud services, SDKs and tools," according to Shanku Niyogi, a general manager with the Visual Studio team, in a blog.

Microsoft isn't new to Eclipse, which is a Java-based open source integrated development environment that originated from IBM's work with the SmallTalk programming language. Microsoft has supported Eclipse development in a number of tools, including Azure Toolkit for Eclipse and the Java SDK for Azure. Niyogi notes in his blog that "with the free Team Explorer Everywhere plugin, developers have access to the full suite of source control, team services, and DevOps capabilities of Visual Studio Team Services from within their IDE," which have been available through the Eclipse Marketplace.

Niyogi blogs about some additional native Eclipse support within a number of Microsoft tools in his keynote at EclipseCon today, which includes open sourcing the Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere Plugin for Eclipse; Kura support in the Azure IoT Suite of tools by way of an Azure IoT Hub Connector to Kura; and Azure Java WebApp support in Azure Toolkit for Eclipse.

Microsoft is also working to support Codenvy's workspace automation tools that are based on Eclipse Che from Azure and Visual Studio Team Services, by way of an extension. "Codenvy's new Visual Studio Team Services extension activates Codenvy workspaces on-demand from within Microsoft's tools, creating a natural workflow that aligns with agile methodologies and principles," said Niyogi. "The Azure VM Marketplace now includes a virtual machine preconfigured with Codenvy, so developers can instantly provision private Codenvy workspaces on Azure."

More information: Niyogi's blog; Eclipse Foundation; Azure Toolkit for Eclipse with Java on Github.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

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