At its TechEd conference today, Microsoft announced the next step in its "mobile first, cloud first" strategy with a preview of Apache Cordova support in Visual Studio. Cordova is a toolkit for building apps for iOS, Android, and Windows using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With the Cordova integration, Visual Studio will directly support building apps for all of these platforms.

Visual Studio has previously supported third-party platforms when used with third-party products, such as Xamarin, which provides a .NET-based build environment for Android and iOS.

This time, the support is coming from Microsoft itself. The integration, now available as a preview release, includes templates both for regular JavaScript and Microsoft's JavaScript derivative TypeScript. Projects can be built, deployed, and debugged all from within Visual Studio, and this includes debugging on the Apache Ripple simulator, real devices (whether running Windows, Windows Phone, Android, or iOS), and the Android emulator.

The Cordova support is significant for a range of reasons. It fits with the company's newly promoted strategy of supporting its services on any platform, not just its own. Previously, the company shipped a range of toolkits for Android and iOS developers to make it easier for them to use Azure to provide back-end cloud services, but development for those platforms would still take place using those platforms' own tooling. This time, it's Microsoft's tools that will be used to develop for iOS and Android.

The Cordova support is also a little surprising because, for Metro-style Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.1 applications, Microsoft has developed its own JavaScript, HTML, and CSS-based framework for use with WinRT. This framework could have been described as a Windows-specific take on the Cordova concept, and it was never entirely clear why Microsoft went that route rather than embracing the already established Cordova platform.

Microsoft has other changes in store, too. In keeping with the more open Microsoft that was on show at Build earlier this year, the company is talking a bit about the future of the .NET platform.

Microsoft plans to develop a cloud-optimized version of .NET that's designed to be embedded into server applications. This will both slim down the framework, omitting features such as GUI support that aren't needed in server applications, and make it easier to distribute. Different applications on the same server will be able to integrate their own version of the framework, to make it easier to run different versions side-by-side. This is a capability that has been a feature of Java practically since its inception.

The company also described some of the features of the next version of ASP.NET, its Web development framework. The next ASP.NET is going to be less monolithic and more modularized than the current framework, making it easier for developers to mix and match just the functionality that they need, for a simpler, leaner environment.

This development is all being done in coordination with the .NET Foundation that Microsoft also announced at Build. Redmond is actively collaborating with Xamarin to ensure that the new work is just as applicable to Mono on Unix as it is to .NET on Windows.

Partly cloudy

The company has also made some cloud-side announcements. Visual Studio Online, the cloud-based application lifecycle management platform built around Team Foundation Service, now has an API and set of hooks so that extensions and integration into third-party services can be developed.

An example of such an integration is integration into the UserVoice suggestion and feedback service. Suggestions made by end-users on UserVoice could be used to raise work items inside VSO, and progress on those work items could be reflected back in the UserVoice entry. Integrations with GitHub, Zendesk, and HipChat are all available or planned.

Companies wanting to move from an on-premises Team Foundation Server installation to VSO can now take advantage of a newly announced migration tool from OpsHub. The free program can copy data into the cloud while preserving change history, work items, and so forth.

Microsoft also announced a new feature for MSDN subscribers. MSDN subscribers will be able to use their subscriptions to run Windows 7 and 8.1 virtual machines in Azure to use them as test platforms.