Microsoft Interoperability at EclipseCon 2011

imageI've just returned from EclipseCon 2011, in wet and less than usually sunny Santa Clara California, and it's been definitely a jam packed and busy event with a lot of things going on. Interoperability @ Microsoft was a Bronze Sponsor for the event and we also had a session, "Open in the Cloud:- Building, Deploying and Managing Java Applications on Windows Azure Platform using Eclipse” by Vijay Rajagopalan, previously architect on our team, Interoperability Strategy, and now leading the Developer Experience work for the Windows Azure product team.

The session primarily covers the work we have done on Windows Azure to make it an open and interoperable platform which supports development using many programming languages and tools. In the session, you can learn the primers on building large-scale applications in the cloud using Java, taking advantage of new Windows Azure Platform as a Service features, Windows Azure applications using Java with Eclipse Tools, Eclipse Jetty, Apache Tomcat, and the Windows Azure SDK for Java.

We have been working on improving the experience for Java developers who use Eclipse to work with Windows Azure. At this session we announced the availability of a new Community Technology Preview (CTP) of a new plugin for Eclipse which provides Java developers with a simple way to build and deploy web applications for Windows Azure. The Windows Azure Plugin for Eclipse with Java, March 2011 CTP, is an open source project released under the Apache 2.0 license, and it is available for download here. This project has been developed by Persistent Systems and Microsoft is providing funding and technical assistance. For more info in this regard please check out the post, “New plugin for Eclipse to get Java developers off the ground with Windows Azure” by Craig Kitterman and the video interview and demo with Martin Sawicki, Senior Program Manager in the Interoperability team.  Please send us feedback on what you like, or don’t like, and how we can improve these tools for you.

I would like to thank the folks at the Eclipse foundation and the community for welcoming us and I look forward to working with you all in the future and hope to see you at EclipseCon next year!

Jas Sandhu, Technical Evangelist, @jassand