Microsoft Touts IntelliJ IDE from JetBrains for Azure Development -- Visual Studio Magazine

2022-05-14 19:20:35 By : Ms. Amy Wei

It's well-known that Microsoft touts Java for Azure cloud development with its Visual Studio IDE and Visual Studio Code editor, but it also supports developers who want to work in other tools, including the IntelliJ IDE from JetBrains.

That support dates back some seven years to when the company announced a preview of the Visual Studio Team Foundation Plugin for IntelliJ that works with IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio.

After various other IntelliJ initiatives over the years, said support took another step forward today (April 29) with the debut of a new blog series about Microsoft's Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ, which is available in the JetBrains Marketplace.

"Welcome to our new blog series for Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ," said Jialuo Gan, a program manager in Microsoft's Developer Division. "Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ is a plugin that allows you to easily create, develop, configure, test, and deploy Java applications to Azure. Our goal of this blog series is to keep you posted on the latest product updates, features and other exciting news."

The marketplace description of the tool reads:

"The plugin allows Java developers to easily develop, configure, test, and deploy highly available and scalable Java web apps. It also supports Azure Synapse data engineers, Azure HDInsight developers and Apache Spark on SQL Server users to create, test and submit Apache Spark/Hadoop jobs to Azure from IntelliJ on all supported platforms.

The inaugural post of the new blog series focuses on the roadmap of future development initiatives, which Microsoft illustrated with this graphic:

Microsoft also highlighted new features and functionality for the toolkit in its latest release that pertain to roadmap items including the very first one listed, integration with Azure services -- specifically Azure Storage Explorer. "It's common for some developers to navigate between IntelliJ IDEA and Azure Storage Explorer during development cycle, therefore, we have now supported the interaction between them," Gan said. "In our latest update, we have supported the action to open local Azure Storage Explorer from our toolkit. You could simply right click the node and find the option of 'Open Azure Storage Explorer.'"

Other new stuff highlighted by Gan include:

In addition to the IntelliJ tool and the aforementioned Android Studio that Microsoft has lauded for its tooling, the company also supports the open source Eclipse IDE, which reportedly was the top IDE for Java coding up until 2016 when IntelliJ took the top spot.

In fact, Microsoft has an Azure Toolkits for Java GitHub repo that houses development for "Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ IDEA" and "Azure Toolkit for Eclipse."

Developers can learn more about the subject of the new blog series in the Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ documentation.

David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.

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