On Wednesday, during its annual Connect(); developer event, Microsoft unveiled a series of products and partnerships that strengthen the company’s Azure cloud platform for building cross-platform apps and services. Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie detailed steps Microsoft is taking to give developers greater choice in the tools they use - including joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum Member to better collaborate with the open source community, welcoming Google to the independent .NET Foundation, and working with Samsung to enable .NET developers to build apps for Samsung devices worldwide.

Guthrie also demonstrated a preview of Visual Studio for Mac, which enables developers to write cloud, mobile and macOS apps on Apple’s Mac operating system using the popular development environment; a preview of the next version of the company’s flagship SQL Server database with support for Linux, Linux-based Docker containers and Windows-based environments; and a preview of Azure App Service on Linux with support for containers.

"By becoming a Linux Foundation Platinum member, Microsoft is better able to collaborate with the open source community to deliver transformative mobile and cloud experiences to more people," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation.

Microsoft has become an active member of the open source community in part through the popularity of its open source and cross-platform application framework .NET Core. Wednesday’s addition of Google to the .NET Foundation’s Technical Steering Group further reinforces the vibrancy of the .NET developer community as well as Google’s commitment to fostering an open platform that supports businesses and developers who have standardized on .NET.

On Wednesday Samsung is releasing a preview of its Visual Studio Tools for Tizen. Developers can use the tools to build .NET apps for the Tizen operating system that runs on millions of Samsung TVs, wearables, mobile devices and many IoT devices around the world.

Microsoft highlighted several announcements Wednesday aimed at helping developers use the tools of their choice to create Android, iOS and Windows apps powered by Linux or Windows Server, including the following:

• The SQL Server on Linux public preview released Wednesday is the first preview of the next version of SQL Server and brings the power of SQL Server to Linux and Linux-based Docker containers, in addition to Windows.
• A new Visual Studio for Mac preview provides a macOS-based integrated development environment designed for building mobile, cloud and macOS apps.
• The availability of Azure App Service on Linux with support for Containers in preview provides native Linux support for Node.js and PHP stacks on Azure App Service and now enables developers to bring their own Docker-formatted container image.

Microsoft also today unveiled services that make it easier for more developers to turn massive amounts of data into personal, intelligent and predictive applications.

• SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1 availability makes database innovations accessible to more applications across product editions.
  The availability of Azure Data Lake services, Azure Data Lake Analytics and Data Lake Store means developers and data scientists now have the capabilities required to easily store and process data at petabyte size files, with massively parallel analytics and enterprise-grade security for insights on data of any size, shape and speed.
• Through the Visual Studio family, SQL Server, Windows, Office and Azure, Microsoft is working to provide a complete platform for applications, spanning mobile and cloud.
• The Visual Studio Mobile Center preview announced Wednesday brings together the cloud and life-cycle services that help developers build, test, distribute and monitor apps built in Objective-C, Swift, Java, Xamarin and React Native for Android-, iOS- and Windows-based devices.
• The Visual Studio 2017 release candidate released Wednesday includes new capabilities to help any developer be more productive for any application and any platform.
• Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2017 and Azure Application Insights are now available, providing a collaboration and DevOps platform for cloud- first, mobile-first scenarios.