Microsoft Will Begin Shipping Eclipse Plugins

Microsoft announced today they have purchased the Teamprise technology from SourceGear, products that allow Eclipse developers to connect to the MS Team Foundation Server (TFS).   The Teamprise clients will be bundle into Visual Studio 2010, which appears to be set for launch in March 2010.

If I am not mistaken, this will be the first time Microsoft will be shipping a commercial product that is made up of Eclipse plugins.   Microsoft has previously sponsored open source plugins for Eclipse but nothing in their core products.  This is a great news and  it reflects the fact a lot of big development shops are using Eclipse and Visual Studio.   It also shows MS is listening to their customers and are taking open source interoperability very seriously.

This is also more than just tapping into the Eclipse user community but accessing the extended Eclipse ecosystem.  As stated in the press release:

…within Eclipse and Eclipse-based integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Rational Application Developer, JBoss, BEA Workshop and Adobe Flex Builder.

With one acquisition, MS TFS has gained interoperability with IBM, Abode, JBoss, Oracle (BEA) plus many others.  What a great example of the power of Eclipse.

I hope the next step for MS is to become a member of the Eclipse Foundation.  This would really make them a first-class member of the Eclipse community.

From http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com