Microsoft has thousands of developers building code for its platforms using Visual Studio. Thousands more use open source Eclipse based IDEs to develop their code and Microsoft wants them to target Windows platforms too.
To that end, Microsoft today announced a series of interoperability initiatives to help Eclipse users develop for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2. and the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
Frankly I’m not surprised. Microsoft has been friendly with the commercially focused Eclipse Foundation for years and I personally see the Windows 7 interop as an extension of that working relationship.
That said the new efforts are still quite interesting.
Among the new and expanded efforts is the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse for PHP developers project, the Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Java and perhaps most interesting is the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight effort.
