Microsoft joins the Eclipse Foundation

With today’s announcement of the partnership between the Eclipse Foundation, Microosft is continuing their efforts in getting some of that developer love. The Eclipse Foundation is known mainly for their work of the Eclipse IDE for Java and C/C++ and prior to the introduction of Android Studio, Eclipse was the main development environment for developers to create and design android applications.

Java is probably still the most widely used programming language in the industry today and Microsoft’s goal in joining the Eclipse Foundation is most likely to deeply integrate a number of their services like Azure and Visual Studio Online to the Eclipse IDE. Like most things Microsoft is doing today, this move to join the Eclipse Foundation is to ensure that developers of other platforms will be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s back-end services like Azure’s cloud services.

Microsoft expects to contribute to the Eclipse Foundation through plugins which are quite popular with Eclipse developer and they are starting off with open-sourcing one of their existing Team Foundation Server plugin available for Eclipse. While Microsoft did not announce any plans to bring support for C# to the Eclipse IDE any time soon, rest assured that Microsoft will still continue to work on Visual Studio.