Microsoft has released a preview of improvements to its Visual Studio IDE and its Team Foundation Service platform that will make it possible (and easy) to create apps for SharePoint through the Azure cloud computing platform. “The biggest benefit [of the improvements] is it’s supereasy,” said Microsoft’s Brian Harry. “You could be up and going, building your app in the cloud in 10 minutes.”
The improvements support Microsoft .NET programming languages, including C#, F#, Visual Basic, and C++, and developers can also program in Java, although that would be slightly more complicated.
At the same time, Microsoft also announced a new feature pack for Visual Studio that improves its support for the development of collaboration-related apps for SharePoint.