Consensys and Microsoft have declared that the Ethereum contract coding language Solidity will be accessible in Microsoft’s Visual Studio integrated development environment. The collaboration between ConsenSys and Microsoft focuses on this integration to empower developers to swiftly create applications based on smart contracts for the public Ethereum blockchain, alongside private and consortium blockchain implementations rooted in Ethereum. This announcement is being made at //Build, Microsoft’s annual developers conference taking place in San Francisco on March 30th; Vitalik Buterin, Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin, and Consensys Enterprise director Andrew Keys are expected to be in attendance.
Vitalik, Andrew, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the //Build pre-conference reception
The integration is realized through an extension for Visual Studio which establishes project scaffolding that includes smart contract sample code, produces ABI and binary files for deployment, facilitates context-sensitive menus for the compilation and deployment of smart contracts, and constructs an automatically generated UI for contract invocation for testing purposes.
This is not the initial occasion that Microsoft has shown interest in Ethereum technologies; the Ethereum Blockchain as a Service offering has been accessible since November 2015, and has broadened to incorporate the BlockApps Strato Ethereum toolkit, along with various Ethereum applications, such as the Cetas decentralized KYC system, the Augur prediction market, ether.camp and the slock.it IoT platform. We anticipate continuing our collaboration with Microsoft to bring Ethereum and blockchain technology to a broader audience.
