Adobe Flex can now be easily integrated with Visual Studio and Eclipse

Adobe Systems at its Adobe Max 2008 conference Tuesday heralded a slew of new technologies, including links between its Flex application development platform and Microsoft’s Visual Studio software development platform.
 
Also paraded at the conference was Flash Catalyst, an interactive design tool for building interfaces and interactive content without coding. The planned Bolt release of the ColdFusion IDE, featuring Eclipse capabilities, was touted as well.

[ For additional news from the Adobe Max conference, see "Adobe bolsters streaming Flash" and "Adobe to offer new tools for UI development"]

In addition, two developments pertaining to Flex development support for Microsoft’s .Net software development technology were unveiled.

“A partner of ours, called Ensemble, out of Vancouver, has created a Visual Studio plug-in called Tofino, which gives you Flex and MXML support,” said Ben Forta, director of platform evangelism at Adobe, in an interview after the morning keynote presentation. Also, Adobe itself is working on a project to boost Flex development in .Net, featuring data services capabilities. That project is with Adobe Labs.

Specifically, Adobe is porting BlazeDS, which has been a Java open-source technology for communicating between Java and Flex/AIR clients, to .Net. Thus, .Net developers can use Flash Remoting and messaging, Adobe said.

Wow, I guess I will be able to use Flex from within Visual Studio soon … I am excited :)