This is a good move by MS but most of this work is done by the Forge team [1] which is a community of open source people that have been doing the hard work for

This is a good move by MS but most of this work is done by the Forge team [1] which is a community of open source people that have been doing the hard work for years -- they deobfuscate/reverse engineer Minecraft code and build an API for it. MS has basically just packaged up a way for working with that API through Visual studio (before this, you would have used Eclipse or any other Java IDE and still can). [1]: https://github.com/MinecraftForge/MinecraftForge https://github.com/MinecraftForge/MinecraftForge