Microsoft has released the new Azure Blockchain Development Kit for the Ethereum blockchain, according to an announcement from Microsoft Azure blog Build Azure on May 6.
The new offering is reportedly an extension to Microsoft’s source-code editor Visual Studio Code, and has been designed to aid developers who are building apps using Microsoft’s newly-released blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) platform, Azure Blockchain Service.
The new extension can also reportedly be used for building apps on the public Ethereum network, and enables developers to use open source blockchain tools such as Solidity and Truffle.
While community-published Solidity and other blockchain tools for Visual Studio Code already exist, the blog post notes that this is the first official set of such development tools officially released by Microsoft, stating:
