Eclipse IDE Evolves into a First-Class Windows 7 Citizen

Microsoft is hard at work, making the next release (3.6) of the Eclipse Integrated Development Tool (IDE) a first-class citizen on Windows 7. In partnership with Tasktop Technologies, the Redmond company has been contributing code to Eclipse in an effort to tailor the IDE to Windows 7. In the video embedded at the bottom of this article, you will be able to see Vijay Rajagopalan, Microsoft principal architect, and Shawn Minto, from Tasktop Technologies, demoing the first results of the two companies’ collaboration on making Eclipse a first-class development platform for Windows 7. When it first announced its partnership with Tasktop Technologies, Microsoft indicated that the duo would deliver on the promise of Windows 7 and Eclipse Interoperability by mid-2010.

“Microsoft is providing funding, technical & architectural assistance and Tasktop is implementing and contributing code. The goal is to improve Eclipse to take advantage of new features in Windows 7. This will empower eclipse developers to be productive and have a compelling experience developing applications using Eclipse on Windows 7. For this first phase, we have been focusing on the user interface components to 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,” Rajagopalan stated.

Eclipse interoperability with Windows 7 has resulted in the evolution of the look and feel of the IDE on Microsoft’s latest Windows client. Integration involves support for the new Superbar (Taskbar), for JumpLists, and for Taskbar icon progress. According to Microsoft, the improvements are delivered at Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) level. Rajagopalan reveals that devs will be able to enjoy the enhancements not only in the Eclipse IDE, but also in all desktop applications created on top of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).

Concomitantly with the Tasktop Technologies partnership in 2009, Microsoft also announced that it was working with France-based IT solutions provider Soyatec on related projects. Rajagopalan offered a heads-up on how their work moved forward. “Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse: we just released an updated version including many bug fixes and compatibility with the latest Windows Azure SDK (version 1.1). Eclipse Tools for Silverlight (eclipse4SL) for Mac and Windows: the next release is planned to this spring.”