Dev Tools For All

Microsoft is executing on its vision of continually bringing the best of Microsoft to other platforms (not just Windows).  Today is an important day in that journey.  Several announcements were made today at Microsoft Connect () related to developer tools / platform.  Here is a brief summary:

.NET / Visual Studio

• .NET Server distributions moving to Open Source projects and will be available for Windows / OS X / Linux
• Open Source community for future improvements to .NET framework
• Visual Studio Community 2013: full featured, fully extensible – available for FREE
• Microsoft Xamarin Partnership – Xamarin Starter Edition (Free)

Office 365

• REST-based Office 365 Dev APIs – Querying messages, attachments, calendar, contacts, files and folders (think automation of existing processes)
• API Sandbox – for sampling/testing Office 365 API calls

 Dev Ops

• Release Management as a Service – available in preview, enable customers to automate and manage application releases without the need to set up or maintain any service infrastructure.
• Cloud Deployment Projects –  allow organizations to more easily and reliably provision and configure development, test and production environments in Azure.
• Chef on Azure – VMs on Azure now can be configured with Chef automatically (just a checkbox during set up)
• Windows Azure VM provisioning via Puppet (Linux and Windows)
• Demo of Chef running on Linux VM in Azure

Mobile Development

With mobile development growing exponentially, it’s also worth noting our Mobile Backend as a Service portfolio in Azure.

• Build cross-platform mobile apps quickly for iOS, Android, Windows or Mac
• Connect apps to on-premises data with hybrid connections
• Easily integrate push notifications without maintaining back end services
• Leverage PaaS solutions for service bus, analytics, or data storage
• Auto-scale back end services to meet client side demands

More information on Mobile Services: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/mobile-services/

IaaS/PaaS Open Source Data Platforms

Not only do we support the workhorses of SQL Server, Azure also supports many other enterprise and open source data platforms popular with development teams

• Oracle
• IBM DB2 Advanced Workgroup Server Edition
• Couchbase
• HortonWorks
• DataStax
• Cloudera
• MySQL
• MongoDB
• RedisCache