Microsoft has finally realized that there’s a growing crowd of developers and techies who just don’t do Windows anymore. Case in point – last week’s rebranding of Windows Azure, now called Microsoft Azure. If you thought this was just a superficial change, you’re wrong, for Azure isn’t the only bit of software that’s moving away from Windows.

At the Build conference in San Francisco yesterday, Microsoft made a big announcement about its Visual Studio suite of developer tools. Previously only available on Windows, Microsoft’s IDE now has a web-based version that does exactly the same thing – Visual Studio Online, which has sailed through its beta tests and is now available to all. Not that it’s totally free of course – if you want more than five users you’ll need to pay a subscription, and it lacks some of the meatier features found in the hard copy version, but it still means developers using Linux or Mac PCs can finally play around with Redmond’s software building kit.

This is part of a broader plan by Microsoft to court developers, following last November’s announcement of a partnership with Xamarin, which makes developer software that’s also compatible with Microsoft’s frameworks and tools, including the .Net framework and C# programming language. Available on both Windows and Mac, Xamarin Studio gives Microsoft another way to reach out to developers it’s previously ignored. Xamarin’s capabilities were demonstrated at Build yesterday by its co-founder Miguel de Icaza.

Microsoft also wants its Visual Studio to embrace Azure, and to encourage tighter integration, users are now allowed to alter the amount of computer power they wish to rent right inside the program. This means that developers can conveniently add or remove instances or servers as they require, without needing to exit the Visual Studio environment. Ironically this is something that AWS already offers its developer customers via an extension, which lets them manage its full range of services from inside the program.

Aside from this, Microsoft is also expanding its mobile-back end services with the addition of Azure Active Directory, a web-based authentication system. During the demonstration an executive from DocuSign illustrated this by signing into its mobile app via Azure Active Directory – whilst using an iPhone – further evidence of how realistic Microsoft is becoming.

This doesn’t mean Microsoft is embracing an entirely new strategy – it’s actually been building up to this for years, albeit somewhat belatedly. But if nothing else, Microsoft’s new products and features should make it seriously appealing to a whole host of new developers.

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