The Eclipse tooling & SDKs are fully compatible with the new version of Windows Azure that has just been released today. We have also included new features that are described on the Microsoft Interoperability Blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/

• 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

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.

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.

All the features that we support in the M2 release for Windows are supported in Mac Platform as well. Some of the key features include Project Management, XAML Design & Editor, C# Editor, Code Completion, build system.

We are excited to share with you RIA development experience on MAC in the form of a “Customer Technology Preview” version. Please give it a try and give us your feedback on the bug tracker, and join the discussion on the user forum.

This demo is hosted on YouTube as well:

We look forward to your feedback and feature proposals. Of course, if you are building Silverlight applications accessing Interoperable Web Services, please share your experience (User Forum).

Our first guidance concentrates on JAX-WS Web Services over HTTP transport using the Apache SOAP stack : CXF

http://www.eclipse4sl.org/documentation/userdoc/html/webservice/cxf

Your feedback, recommendations and contributions are welcome.

The next guidance will focus on the interoperability between Silverlight and REST Web Services.

If you have installed the previous release, you need to uninstall it first: Open Eclipse Update manager: Help → “Software updates…”. Please follow the operation sequence indicated in below screen shot:

And then you can install the new version following the standard installation procedure.

Here are the new features added in this release:

1. XAML editor

All features of code context assist are completed. The project update is supported automatically when an element is defined in the default references.

1.1 Name conflict detection

When the same name is used by different elements, an error marker is created.

2 XAML Preview

We have overcome several limitations of Silverlight’s XAML loader by introducing a sophisticate pre-processing engine.

Style support

In the following example, the style definition is applied the TextBlock for the preview.

Support of User defined component

In the following example, the PersonView is a user defined Component, which contains fields “First name” and “Last name”. The Page.xaml embeds this component.

3. Resource management

3.1 Resource operation such as: add, rename and delete

All operations update automatically the project configuration files in msbuild format to keep the project in consistent state.

3.2 New JavaScript wizard

This wizard is used to created a JavaScript file.

3.3 New UI Page wizard

This wizard is used to created a XAML file without code-behind class.

3.4 New C# Class wizard

This wizard allows creating a C# class.

3.5 Resource view tools

An existing resource can be added in the project configuration via the wizard “Add existing item” or using “Import” wizard:

4. Build - Add verbose option in Preferences

Several users have met a problem of build: https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=2642492&forum_id=870800. This option helps the investigation.

When this option is checked, all building messages will be displayed in the “Console” view. By default, only the messages with errors/warnings are displayed.

5. Run

The preview release has bundled an old version of Chiron used as lightweight Web server. This version has a critical bug in Vista 64 bits. This release updates the latest version with the fix.

6. Complete online user documentation

A complete online documentation is available in two ways: Web and plugin. The documentation in plugin can be installed via Eclipse Update Manager:

7. Defects & Regression Testing

• ~200 Unit tests
• 180 integration tests (here is the QA report)
• ~30 Bug fixes

8. Developer Usability Testing

All examples provided in Silverlight SDK are tested: http://www.eclipse4sl.org/documentation/QA/1.0.0M2/XAMLEditor/5.1.2.html

9. Guidance on Silverlight applications consuming Java Web Services

We will publish a Guidance series about building Silverlight applications accessing Java Web Services using REST, SOAP and other standards. The guidance will be published on our official web site in the upcoming weeks.

10. Next Steps / Milestones

Stay tuned for future updates for the project. We are working actively to plan and scope the next milestones for the project. Do let us know if you have any feedback or feature requests:  http://www.eclipse4sl.org/community/

Finally, we’d like to thank everyone for their contributions on this project: bug reports, feature requests, suggestions, etc…

1. What’s Silverlight?
2. Architecture of Eclipse SLDT
   • Project management
   • Tools of development
   • Build and Run
3. Roadmap
4. Demo on interoperability between Silverlight and Java Web service

Please feel free to come by and get in touch directly with us.