There was an article on ComputerWorld yesterday titled Microsoft woos developers under the Silverlight. It would appear that Microsoft is now targeting Java developers for their Silverlight RIA platform.
Microsoft is funding a French open-source project to build tools that would enable programmers to use the popular open-source Eclipse framework to write Silverlight applications, said Brian Goldfarb, a director in Microsoft’s developer platform division, in an interview last week. This should also let Eclipse programmers share their Silverlight applications with developers working in Microsoft’s Visual Studio framework, Goldfarb said. The project is being hosted on SourceForge.
So I decided to look into this Eclipse plugin to see what it was all about. The plugin homepage can be found here. Those of you who know me, know that I’m no Eclipse fanboy, I’m more of an IntelliJ kind of guy, but I find this announcement rather intriguing. It would appear that Microsoft is finally taking an interest in a plugin for Eclipse that would allow people to do C# development using something other than their own product. Next thing you know Microsoft will be announcing Visual Studio will be migrating to the Eclipse platform and .NET developers will now have an IDE that doesn’t completely suck. Sorry Microsoft, but if it weren’t for ReSharper, developing in Visual Studio would be unbearable.
