NEO joined the Microsoft-created .NET Foundation as a member, the first blockchain organization to do so. It seems the project’s newest executive, Microsoft veteran John deVadoss, is making good use of his connections.

It appears NEO’s newest executives are flexing their connections at Microsoft. John deVadoss, the current head of NEO’s Seattle-based development push, was the former architect and director of .NET during his nine-year tenure at Microsoft. Peng Huang, who joined NEO in tandem with deVadoss, is another Microsoft veteran who boasts over a decade of experience at the corporation.

“Based on our shared core values and principles, I am confident that this partnership will accelerate developer innovation to drive mass adoption of blockchain and build the foundation for next-gen Internet,” announced deVadoss at the .NET Conference 2019.

The partnership mirrors NEO’s strategy of building the most “developer friendly” in its effort to supplant Ethereum.

NEO is incorporating a blockchain toolkit directly into .NET. The project aims to use the integration to improve the smart contract development experience and accelerate the creation of dApps on its blockchain—ultimately with the aim to attract more software developers to the platform.

Specifically, some of the features of the integration include a smart contract debugger, a software development life cycle manager, smart contract compiling and editing enhancements, more expansive libraries, and a visual devtracker.

In a comment to CryptoSlate, deVadoss said:

“As the only major blockchain platform with a commitment to a polyglot developer community, this is another step towards taking smart contract development mainstream. Working with our friends in the .NET team at Microsoft and in the .NET Foundation, we are democratizing blockchain development.”

Erik Zhang, the founder and CTO of NEO stated:

“Moving forward, we anticipate closely collaborating with the .NET Foundation to deliver the most developer-friendly blockchain infrastructure for .NET developers—as exemplified by our recently launched NEO Blockchain Toolkit for .NET.”

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