News

Microsoft Promotes IntelliJ for Azure

• By David Ramel
• May 2, 2022

Microsoft launched a new blog series last week focused on its Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ. Available on Redmond's "Developer Blogs" portal, the first post was written by Jialuo Gan, Program Manager in Microsoft's Developer Division. It focuses on the product roadmap for next few months.

"Our goal of this blog series is to keep you posted on the latest product updates, features and other exciting news," Gan wrote in the blog intro.

JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA is an integrated development environment (IDE) that allows developers to view the company's real-time app code dependency intelligence within the popular code-centric Java IDE. The Azure plugin for IntelliJ was created to allow Java developers to more easily develop, configure, test, and deploy highly available and scalable Java web apps. It's available on the JetBrains Marketplace.

Microsoft supports Java developers with its Visual Studio IDE and Visual Studio Code editor. The company's support for IntelliJ users began about seven years ago when it announced a preview of the Visual Studio Team Foundation Plugin for IntelliJ, which also works with Android Studio.

The Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ also supports Azure Synapse data engineers, Azure HDInsight developers, and Apache Spark on SQL Server users, allowing the latter to create, test, and submit Apache Spark/Hadoop jobs to Azure from IntelliJ on all supported platforms.

Microsoft also highlighted new features and functionality for the toolkit in its latest release that pertain to roadmap items, including integration with Azure services—specifically Azure Storage Explorer.

"It's common for some developers to navigate between IntelliJ IDEA and Azure Storage Explorer during development cycle," Gan wrote, "therefore, we have now supported the interaction between them. In our latest update, we have supported the action to open local Azure Storage Explorer from our toolkit. You could simply right click the node and find the option of 'Open Azure Storage Explorer.'"

Updates highlighted in the post included:

• Pin Favorite Resources in Azure Explorer: "With the latest release, developers now can pin any resources into the Favorites root node in Azure explorer. To use this feature, simply find the resource and right click to choose 'Mark as favorite' option or use Shortcuts(F11)."
• Trigger Function with IntelliJ Native Http Client: "We have now supported Triggers in Http Functions with IntelliJ Native Http Client Tool when you are using IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition. With this enhancement, developers can manually modify HTTP requests and configure relevant parameters to trigger their Functions."
• Performance Improvement: "The latest updates bring the improvements on the performance of authentication as well. With the recent 3.63.0 Release of Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ, the login performance with Azure CLI has been improved."

Microsoft's support for development in non-Microsoft-specific dev environments includes the open-source Eclipse IDE, which reportedly was the top IDE for Java coding until 2016, when IntelliJ took the top spot. Microsoft also has an Azure Toolkits for Java GitHub repo that houses development for Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ IDEA and Azure Toolkit for Eclipse.

Developers can learn more about the subject of the new blog series in the Azure Toolkit for IntelliJ documentation.