Microsoft has made another play at interoperability with a key open source software offering.
At Eclipse Summit Europe on Wednesday, the Redmond, Wash. software giant announced that it is working on four open source projects with two open source companies -- Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec -- to enable Eclipse users to develop on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Azure and Microsoft Silverlight.
TaskTop, of Canada, will provide enhancements to the Eclipse IDE in the first quarter of 2010, according to Microsoft's interoperability blog.
"Microsoft and Tasktop will collaborate to extend the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), and in particular the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), to include the mapping of new features offered by Windows 7," the blog reports. "This will allow Eclipse developers to take advantage of the new user interface features offered by Windows 7, directly from the Eclipse IDE and from any desktop applications built on top of the Eclipse platform."
Microsoft also announced that partner Soyatec of France will develop Java and PHP interoperability tools for Eclipse that will enable development on Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing platform and with Microsoft's Silverlight IDE.
From the press release issued today, Soyatec will provide: