Although in reality the notion that “Microsoft have gone open source” is hardly a news bulletin, today on the Connection(); keynote Microsoft have shown just how far they have come by announcing that they are now an Official Platinum Partner of the Linux Foundation. This is another major milestone for a company that, according to Rob Mensching, never really “understood what the Open Source community was really about”.

In other news, Visual Studio Code (Microsoft’s open source code editor) continues to grow apace with more users (1 million active users) and more plugins written, including one for SQL. And a fully fledged IDE (not just an Editor like VS Code) is available for Mac. This is pushing with Microsoft’s ideology of “any developer, any platform, any time”. Oh, and Visual Studio 2017 was announced. In fact you can go download the RC now.

Finally, as blogged elsewhere, features previously exclusive to SQL Server Enterprise Edition are now available in lower versions, as long as you install SQL Server 2016 SP1. That’s certainly deserving of a fist pump….