Development and deployment of Ethereum based applications, commonly referred to as DApps, can be a challenging task for developers. With over 1 million downloads, Truffle has proven to be a premier suite of tools that can be used for developing smart contracts and DApps for both the public Ethereum network on main-net as well as private consortiums.
Truffle streamlines the process of recognizing changes, migrating them to the underlying blockchain, and providing a framework to allow a rich debugging experience with common step through of code and inspection of low-level components.
The Truffle Suite fits very nicely with the products that Microsoft is building to help developers build end to end solutions on Ethereum. For example, when building solutions leveraging Azure Blockchain Workbench, a key component is creating the underlying smart contract(s). Using Truffle framework to build, test, and maintain the smart contracts, which will be uploaded to Azure Blockchain Workbench, makes the process for developers and IT Pros a streamlined process.
The team at Truffle hosted the first annual TruffleCon this weekend in Portland, Oregon. The event brought together developers from around the country to continue to build the community and create connections in the Ethereum developer space, sharing experiences, feedback, challenges, and success stories! We at Microsoft are big fans of both the Truffle Suite and the team, and we’re proud to sponsor and participate in this first ever event. Program managers and engineers from our blockchain engineering team attended the event to share our experiences and learn from others.
As part of our collaboration with Truffle, we have been working on the deeper integration of Truffle into the development pipeline. We are pleased to announce the development of a VS Code extension to better integrate the experience of developing with Truffle and VS Code.
The goal of the extension is to increase developer productivity when using Truffle and associated framework elements, such as Ganache. The Truffle suite of tools already works very well in the IDE, it does require developers to jump between sub-windows in the IDE, especially when using Ganache for local development. We showed this extension for the first time at the TruffleCon conference and plan to make it available for download in the Visual Studio marketplace later this fall.
We are pleased to announce that Microsoft is connecting Truffle and Azure Blockchain Workbench in a more seamless way. Currently, users of Azure Blockchain Workbench can leverage sample smart contracts as a starting point for their solutions. Samples for basic provenance, supply chain, asset management, and more are available via our Workbench Git. However, they are now available as Truffle boxes so developers can get started with Workbench even faster.
For those that would like to get started using Truffle with zero installs, the Azure Marketplace images for the current stable version as well as the beta versions are available now. These single click images make it very easy to get started using Truffle, in a sandboxed compute node on Azure.
Lastly, David Burela, Senior SDE from Microsoft Australia presented at Trufflecon and has published a guide to show how any Ethereum project on GitHub can take advantage of Azure DevOps Pipelines with the Truffle suite of tools, to automatically build and test Ethereum smart contracts upon every commit or pull request. With the new YAML based build pipeline, a project on GitHub can be configured in less than five minutes, and three lines of YAML code. Find the notes from his presentation online.
We look forward to partnering with Truffle to continue integrating our offerings!
