HOUSTON — Microsoft this morning announced support for the Apache Cordova cross-device development platform from within Visual Studio at its TechEd 2014 conference.

The integration helps drive Microsoft’s message of “mobile first, cloud first” for customers, something it had already enabled with its Xamarin integration, but has now been made native to the Visual Studio development environment. The integration will allow Microsoft developers to create applications with either JavaScript or Microsoft’s new TypeScript language, according to the company.

“A cloud without connected devices is nothing but untapped potential,” said corporate vice president Brad Anderson in his keynote address. “And devices without the cloud are nothing but untapped potential.”

Microsoft also announced open APIs for Visual Studio Online, which uses REST, OAuth and service hooks to enable developers to bring their existing Windows applications to the cloud to achieve the benefits of integration and collaboration. This builds on Microsoft’s Universal Windows Applications plan announced earlier this year at the Build conference, which lets developers use 90% of the code they write for an application across all of Microsoft’s platforms: PCs, tablets, phones and the Xbox.

(Related: Microsoft unveils Universal Windows Applications)

Along with this came a preview of the next iteration of the .NET framework, designed to enable developers to use .NET features without having to run the entire underlying framework. This makes it lighter and optimized for the cloud. Developers can bundle the application, a VM and other features into a “container,” and run those applications on the same server even though they’re using different versions of .NET.

Changes are also coming to ASP.NET, which will follow the more modularized lead of the .NET framework to enable developers to choose only those features and functions they need. The updated version will be called vNext.

As for the infrastructure underneath this all—Azure—Microsoft has released a preview of Azure Files, which is common storage that VMs and applications can use in a shared manner. The company also announced a beta of Azure Redis Cache to reduce response time and load on the back end.