Nearly a year after Microsoft made one of the biggest outlays in its history to acquire the open-source code repository GitHub, it plans to integrate that near-ubiquitous coding tool with its Visual Studio and Active Directory products in new ways.
As 6,000 developers gather in downtown Seattle for Microsoft Build, the company plans to announce Monday morning that GitHub now has tighter links to the Visual Studio integrated development environment and Active Directory identity-management tool. Visual Studio Subscription customers will be able to purchase GitHub Enterprise as part of that existing subscription, and GitHub Enterprise subscribers will be able to link developer teams with Active Directory, the widely used tool for managing access to secure corporate resources.
Ever since Microsoft laid out $7.5 billion for GitHub — the third-largest acquisition in the 44-year history of the company — developers have been waiting to see how Microsoft would manage one of the most widely used tools in software development. GitHub’s usage numbers are a little shady, as the company counts everyone who has ever used the service as a user, but there’s little doubt that software development organizations large and small are using its code repository service at the heart of their development efforts.
Integrating the service with two of Microsoft’s most popular developer tools has always been on the radar, as Azure “>CTO Mark Russinovich told attendees at our GeekWire Cloud Summit last year. The integrations that Microsoft plans to announce Monday make sense for companies that are using both GitHub and either Visual Studio or Active Directory as part of their corporate software infrastructure, and fall short of the fears that GitHub users would be shuttled into Microsoft Azure cloud computing services in short order.
Microsoft also plans to let GitHub users sign into Azure Portal and Azure DevOps using their GitHub logins, and use recommendations on GitHub to power a new service in Visual Studio that identifies AI features that likely make sense for your application based on community feedback.
