Microsoft woos open sourcers with Visual Studio 2010

VSLive Microsoft has invited the open-source community to build plug-ins for Visual Studio 2010, and has improved database support to help build partner backing for its planned integrated development environment (IDE).

The general manager for Microsoft's Visual Studio told The Reg he'd like to see open-source developers contribute their best ideas to Microsoft's next IDE.

Visual Studio 2010 is still in the early planning phase, but is already scheduled to support a number of open-source projects and tools, mostly from Microsoft or people recruited from the community.

The single exception to the Microsoft presence will be JQuery, which developers will find is woven tightly into the IDE's fabric through the existing IntelliSense feature. Microsoft demonstrated JQuery's integration with IntelliSense along with the planned Visual Studio 2010 interface and tighter integration between testing and development features at its VSLive show in San Francisco, California on Tuesday.

JQuery is an open-source JavaScript library that greatly simplifies the task of HTML development. Microsoft expects it will reduce the workload for Microsoft coders building web pages using its ASP.NET AJAX and MVC frameworks.

Visual Studio general manager Jason Zander called JQuery a "good example of open-source contributed code" for Visual Studio 2010. "We will look for opportunities for things like that," he said.

He also signaled his openness to greater integration between Visual Studio 2010 and MySQL, the dominant open-source database - among web developers, at least. Microsoft also announced a plug-in for Oracle to the planned Visual Studio 2010 Team System (VSTS), completing the closed-source database troika for Visual Studio that includes SQL Server and IBM's DB2. The planned Oracle plug-in from Quest Software should let you use Oracle as a data and workflow repository for VSTS.

Missing, though, is an open-source database option.

Zander said that the Visual Studio 2010 features demonstrated at VSLive would work on "another database," and that it "would just take another vendor to go ahead and do the work".

"We will keep looking at what the market looks like and the demand looks like," he said.