Microsoft joins the Eclipse Foundation and brings more tools to the community

Visual Studio

March 8th, 2016

At Microsoft, our developer mission is to deliver experiences that empower any developer, building any application, on any OS. And this mission requires us to be open, flexible, and interoperable: to meet developers and development teams where they are, and provide tools, services and platforms that help them take ideas into production.

This week, we’re attending EclipseCon to connect and advance our vision with the Eclipse community. We recognize the great work coming out of the Eclipse and Java developer community and appreciate that Eclipse developer tools are used by millions of developers worldwide. We have worked with the Eclipse Foundation for many years to improve the Java experience across our portfolio of application platform and development services, including Visual Studio Team Services and Microsoft Azure.

Today, I’m happy to share that Microsoft is taking its relationship with the Eclipse community to the next level by joining the Eclipse Foundation as a Solutions Member. Joining the Eclipse Foundation 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.

Microsoft delivers a number of Eclipse-based tools today. The Azure Toolkit for Eclipse and Java SDK for Azure enables Eclipse users to build cloud applications. And 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. These offerings will continue to be maintained and shared through the Eclipse Marketplace

Additionally, I was honored to join Tyler Jewell, of Codenvy, onstage today to announce new Azure and Visual Studio Team Services interoperability with Codenvy’s workspace automation tools, built on Eclipse Che. With Visual Studio Team Services, Azure, and Codenvy, software development teams can collaborate more easily than ever before. 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. The Azure VM Marketplace now includes a virtual machine preconfigured with Codenvy, so developers can instantly provision private Codenvy workspaces on Azure.

We’re also announcing more tools and services specifically for Java and Eclipse developers that provide powerful development solutions and services that span platforms.

We are open sourcing the Team Explorer Everywhere Plugin for Eclipse on GitHub today, so we can develop it together with the Eclipse community.

Azure IoT Suite support in Kura. We will contribute an Azure IoT Hub Connector to Kura that will allow to easily connect gateways running Kura to Azure IoT Suite.

Azure Java WebApp support in the Azure Toolkit for Eclipse, which makes it easy to take a Java web app and have it running in Azure within seconds

A refreshed and updated Azure Java Dev Center

With the Java Tools Challenge, we are inviting Java developers to build apps and extensions for VSTS.

In addition to participating in the keynote, we will have a booth onsite and hold two sessions at the event. EclipseCon Sessions:

The Internet of Unexpected Things, by Olivier Bloch, Senior Program Manager, Azure IoT

Connecting to the cloud many different devices of various form factors, powered by eclectic platforms running apps developed in random languages to build an advanced end-to-end IoT solution seems (and often is) as complicated as this sentence is long… Let’s take a look at how it’s done with Azure IoT services, device SDKs and tools in a demo-heavy session for developers. From sensors to advanced analytics, you’ll discover how to take advantage of the open source SDKs and tools that make it easy to connect devices to capture and analyze untapped data as well as monitor and control your IoT infrastructure.

Integrating Different IDEs with a Common Set of Developer Services, Dave Staheli, Software Engineering Manager, Visual Studio Team Services

Modern applications require varied tools and languages to address multiple platforms and form factors. Often, different tools are used by teams to plan, code, build, track, test, deploy, and monitor. How can these activities be normalized to reduce team friction? This session details an approach Microsoft is taking to plugin development. By building plugins for different IDEs that integrate with a common set of team services, developers can use diverse tools to participate in the same team activities. We’ll share experiences in reusing code across plugins for different IDEs, give demos with Eclipse, IntelliJ, and Visual Studio, and discuss technologies on the brink of making this even easier.

Our announcements today further strengthen our investment in cross-platform development. And our membership in the Eclipse Foundation formally recognizes our to Eclipse and Java developers. We’re looking forward doing more with the Eclipse community going forward. If you have ideas or feedback, I’d encourage you to please share with us through our Visual Studio UserVoice Site.

Thank you!