Consensys and Microsoft have announced that the Ethereum contract programming language Solidity will be available in Microsoft’s Visual Studio<\/a> integrated development environment. ConsenSys and Microsoft collaborated on this integration to enable developers to rapidly build smart contract-based applications for the public Ethereum blockchain, as well as private and consortium blockchain deployments based on Ethereum. This integration is being revealed at \/\/Build<\/a>, Microsoft’s annual developer conference, in San Francisco on March 30th; Vitalik Buterin, Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin and Consensys Enterprise director Andrew Keys will be present.<\/p>\n The integration comes in the form of an extension to Visual Studio<\/a> that creates project scaffolding with smart contract sample code, generates ABI and binary files for deployment, supports context-sensitive menus for compilation and deployment of smart contracts, and build an automatically generated UI for contract calling for testing purposes.<\/p>\n This is not the first time that Microsoft has expressed interest in Ethereum technologies; the Ethereum Blockchain as a Service offering has been available since November 2015<\/a>, and has expanded to include the BlockApps Strato<\/a> Ethereum toolkit, as well as several Ethereum applications, including the Cetas decentralized KYC system<\/a>, the Augur prediction market<\/a>, ether.camp<\/a> and the slock.it<\/a> IoT platform. We look forward to continuing to work together with Microsoft on bringing Ethereum and blockchain technology to the masses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"20160329_185640\"](\"https:\/\/blog.ethereum.org\/images\/posts\/2016\/03\/20160329_185640-1.jpg\")
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Vitalik, Andrew and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the \/\/Build pre-conference reception<\/small><\/center><\/p>\n