It was a bit of a surprise to hear Microsoft announcing its sponsorship of this week’s inaugural Node.js Summit. Now we learn the Cloud9 IDE is now supporting the Microsoft Windows Azure platform-as-a-service.

Cloud9 is a browser-based tool for building, debugging and deploying applications to the cloud no matter what OS you’re running locally. It’s designed to make it easy to package source, create a hosted service, and publish the package, according to Microsoft’s blog entry. It also includes version control by way of integration with GitHub and BitBucket. And now it includes Windows Azure portal integration.

Naturally, Cloud9 doesn’t just support Azure, even if that was what Microsoft was at the Node.js Summit to trumpet. It supports other clouds, including Heroku. There’s a free pricing plan, with the “ultimate” Cloud9 development-as-a-service experience costing $15 per month.

Back to Azure: Node.js is rapidly becoming a major standard in the cloud computing developer world (as proven by the fact that there’s a summit for it). The notoriously proprietary Microsoft’s love for the standard may be out of character. But it’s certainly not unwelcome, and I think that it’s going to lead to a lot more cloud ISV love for Azure in return.