Microsoft Supports Eclipse IDE For Azure, Windows7, Silverlight

By Barb Mosher | Published Nov 5, 2009

First Microsoft's Interoperability Team announced a PHP Toolkit, then we saw Microsoft throw their support behind the CodePlex.org Foundation, and we hear rumors of a new open source content management system. So now what?

Well the Microsoft Interoperability Team has announced support for the open source IDE Eclipse. At the Eclipse Summit Europe, they offered up a few new solutions in partnership with open source companies Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec:

An Enhanced Developer Experience for Eclipse on Windows 7
Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse
Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Java
Eclipse Tools for Silverlight

Microsoft provides funding and architectural guidance on the projects.

According to Microsoft, the goal here is to "help developers using the Eclipse platform take advantage of the new features in Windows 7 and Window Server 2008 R2, and reinforce Java and PHP interoperability with Windows Azure and Microsoft Silverlight."

You can get all the details on these four projects on Microsoft's Interoperability blog.

And while these projects sound interesting, there's another one underway that caught our attention: Microsoft has joined up with IBM, Zend Technologies, and others to work on a new open source, cloud interoperability project.

Called Simple API for Cloud Application Services, this project is designed to help create basic cloud applications that will run in all of the major cloud platforms. This would include the Amazon Web Services, even though Amazon is not part of the project.