The Eclipse Foundation is the non-profit which oversees Eclipse, an open source community building developer tools. Microsoft has a history of working with the Eclipse Foundation and building integrations with Visual Studio Team Services and Microsoft Azure. Today, Microsoft announced it will be further supporting open source technologies by joining the Eclipse Foundation as a Solutions Member.
In today’s statement, Shanku Niyogi, General Manager of the Visual Studio Team, said:
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 also announced new interoperability between Azure, Visual Studio Team Services, and Codenvy’s workspace automation tools built on Eclipse Che. With this new interoperability Codenvy workspaces can be activated on-demand from within Microsoft’s tools. The Azure VM Marketplace also now includes a virtual machine preconfigured with Codenvy.
Finally, Microsoft announced even more tools and services specifically for Java and Eclipse developers, including:
- 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.
Along with yesterday’s huge news that SQL Server will now be available on Linux, Microsoft’s recent trend of embracing open source technology seems to be picking up steam. Potentially, more news will come at Build 2016, Microsoft’s conference for developers later this month.
