We are very happy to announce immediate availability of the feature-completed major release 1.0.0 as scheduled in the project plan. It is an eclipse-based cross-platform RIA development environment for Silverlight: two platforms are supported directly:

• Windows NT/Vista/2000 32 bits
• Mac OS X 10.5.x

The mains features that we have shipped are

• XAML Editor & Preview with code hinting and code completion
• Full compatibility with Microsoft’s Development and Design Tools
• Silverlight Project System and Silverlight Compiler
• Interoperability with Java Middleware webservices based on JAX & REST

The plug-in can be download in this page http://www.eclipse4sl.org/download/. Some Webdemos, tutorials and guides of best-practices can help you get started http://www.eclipse4sl.org/learn/

Migration to Eclipse Foundation is going forward positively. Eclipse Management Organization (EMO) has declared the project creation review successful. We will keep you informed on the progress.

From now, we’ll start to working on the Spring 2010 release. This release will primarily focus on improved Mac developer experience, Silverlight 3.0 design time support on Windows platform & extensibility. The upcoming version of Eclipsee4SL will also align with Eclipse Helios schedule.

Your feedback is very important for us to prioritize the features and schedule the development plan. Your contributions are welcome in the form of Bug/Feature request, User experience/Best-practice, Demo project, example sources, etc.

-Yves Yang

This project started to shape up when we first prototyped the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse www.windowsazure4e.org. We wanted to build within the Eclipse IDE a Windows Azure “storage explorer” which allows developers to browse data contained in the Windows Azure storage component, including blobs, tables, and queues. The Storage Explorer was developed in Java (like any Eclipse extension), and we realized that abstracting the RESTful communication aspect between the Storage Explorer user interface and the Azure storage component made a lot of sense. So this led us to package the Windows Azure SDK for Java developers as open source project now living here www.windowsazure4j.org.

In short, the Windows Azure SDK for Java enables developers to easily leverage Azure storage service in their Java applications. The logical architecture is very simple:

From a deployment’s perspective, you can either deploy the SDK with a web application or with a desktop application

Of course, comments and feedback are welcome, so feel free to try this out and join us on the forum.

We are very excited to introduce the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, an open source plug-in that enables PHP developers using Eclipse to create web applications that target Windows Azure.

In a nutshell, the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse provides a series of wizards and utilities that allow developers to write, debug, and configure for and deploy PHP applications to Windows Azure. For example the project creation wizard looks like this:

Architecturally speaking, the plug-in leverages the PHP Development Tools (PDT) framework for enabling PHP developers with integrated developer experiences. We are planning to move fast on this project and deliver a final version 1.0 by the end of 2009.

We really hope this project will give PHP users more options when they want to leverage cloud services and of course we’re seeking feedback on feature and user experience. Feel free to speak up on the forum.