Microsoft is joining the Eclipse Foundation,  the open source community for developers, as a Solutions member, one rank down from the main Strategic members such as IBM, Google and Oracle. 

Microsoft made the announcement at EclipseCon, the Eclipse conference held in Virginia. The Eclipse Foundation oversees the development of the Java-based Eclipse IDE and tools platform.

Eclipse was originally formed by a group led by IBM with the intention of developing a platform for Java including an IDE and tools. The success of the early work led to the formation of the Eclipse Foundation.

While Microsoft has joined at the lower Solutions level, the move is still important given Microsoft's position as the developers of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, for which Eclipse is an alternative.

Shanki Niyogi, General Manager of Visual Studio at Microsoft, said that:

"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." 

Alongside the announcement of the new membership, Microsoft also announced an improved Azure Toolkit for Eclipse that adds support for the deployment of lightweight Java applications, and for Web app management using the Azure Explorer view. The Tomcat, Jetty and Zulu OpenJDK for Java deployments into Azure cloud services have also been updated. Microsoft has also made the Team Explorer Everywhere plugin open source. The plugin lets developers use the Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Team Services from Eclipse. 

More Information

Microsoft Visual Studio Blog

Eclipse Downloads

Azure Toolkit For Eclipse

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