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Microsoft Releases Browser-Based IDE, Visual Studio Online
rjmarvin writes "Microsoft today announced a web-based development environment for app creation to complement Visual Studio 2013, called Visual Studio Online. Microsoft Senior V.P. S. Somasegar says the new web-based IDE is designed for quick tasks related to building Windows Azure websites and services. Microsoft will be releasing the Visual Studio Online Application Insights service in a limited preview to show developers how to deploy and perform in conjunction with Visual Studio 2013's new features."
VS Online: "All your sources are belong to us"
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
All this cloud application talk reminds me of my first computer job. I worked on PCs, but most of the rest of the people in the company still used 3270-era terminals. Usually I would sit surrounded in auditory haze of clicky typing. Sometimes, it would gradually slow down, then dwindle off to a few isolated clicks. Finally somebody would yell “Are you on the clock?” (referring to the mainframe busy icon on the terminal's status bar). Then everybody would get up for a while and chat and have coffee until somebody yelled “It's back on!”
"The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
As usual, poor article submission is confusing everyone!
There is a real IDE, with proper syntax highlighting, code completion, etc, that runs in any browser. It's called Visual Studio Monaco. It's only available for Azure users right now.
See here for a few videos of the thing in action.
All the stability of Internet Explorer for a developer sandbox, and all the speed of your local internet connection! No more pesky waiting for your SATA drive! Now you can access your code through the blazing speed of your cable modem! MUCH faster. And add to that the security of not actually hosting your files locally. The cloud is always a better solution! For anything! I feel much better knowing that some faceless someone at Microsoft will be in charge of my backups. I certainly can't be trusted to do them.
Win-win I say. This sounds golden.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=cache:lmgtfy.com&l=1
Warning: if you follow that recursive link you'll crash the googles and all our internets will stop.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
It's kind of a dumb question; but 'Azure' is actually a fairly slippery beast.
First it was going to be a totally new and revolutionary Windows, man, that, like, totally redefined what it meant to be 'Windows' and freed your mind from the constraints of a single 'Windows system' as you just ran your win32 applications totally in the cloud.
Since that time, it has moved more in the direction of an EC2-like "just a lot of VMs that you can spool up programmatically without calling your sales rep" structure, with the gradual addition of various more abstracted services (eg. 'MS SQL-compatible database, no need to look at the system underneath it', 'IIS instance of given capacity, no need to look underneath', etc.)
My impression is that the original Grand Architectural Vision of The Future didn't entirely pan out; but they've been fairly fast and aggressive about retooling the parts that did work into a mixture of rental VMs, and abstractions of services that abstract more cleanly than 'arbitrary win32 application' does.
Who here is using Azure?
What, exactly, are you using it for?
Why did you choose it over self hosted?
Why did you choose it over AWS or Google?
That's a long answer, but a few bullets:
- We do, 50-100 servers depending on what the elastic scaling is doing. Even mix between Linux VMs and .NET services, distributed across three Azure data centers .NET code. Integration with Eclipse is really fantastic. The task and bug tracking tools are great. Price was really great when free, but is still very competitive for other hosted services now that its a paid service.
- We also make good use of TFService (now Visual Studio Online) -- 80% of the code in it being Java code not
The question of why Azure vs AWS/Google? That's a tougher one ... but briefly: ... basically its the whole package rather than bits and pieces.
- The tooling is just better. AWS and Google just seems to take more time to do the same task. YMMV
- Ancillary services. The Service Bus, Azure ActiveDirectory, the easy integration between enterprise systems and the Azure services, ease of monitoring via centralized performance counters and logs, etc
I have extensively used Amazon's various services four or five years ago and liked them, but they tended to be more simplistic on the service side and heavier weight on the compute side (having to maintain my own VMs, etc).
Cost is another factor -- particularly when you get up into high usage and can commit to that usage, the prices really start to drop quickly.
Lastly, the support is, bar none, better than anything you can get from Google or Amazon. It may cost me some money -- or a lot of money -- but I can get someone from MS on the phone who will work through an issue, or something we simply want to do in a different way, until it gets done. There's a point in a business that support like that becomes the most important thing, because its cheaper than putting a dev or two on some puzzle and have them experiment their way through it.
Anyway, that's my experience. YMMV.
This could be a good thing if they have a HUGE parallel farm for compiling. Let my app compile in 2.4 seconds on their supercomputer farm instead of taking 20 minutes here on my laptop would be a huge thing.
microsoft might be on to something if they eliminate the #1 time waster, waiting for a compile.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This probably saved him a few hours of work. After I was done, I was reflecting on the quality of the tools at my disposal. Calling the assembly language function from C was significantly easier than it was on the last platform I tried it on, and even though gdb isn't particularly friendly it is an extremely useful debugging tool once you know your way around it. His IDE had crapped about 50 files into his project structure and had turned out to be a significantly less capable tool for all its vaunted "user friendliness." It probably took me less time to set up make with targets for the .c, .asm, executable and clean than it did for him to set the project up originally in his IDE, and I had no additional clutter in my project directory.
Programmers and marketroids these days are far too enamored of shiny geegaws that don't add anything useful to their application. I have on several occasions witnessed a team throwing framework after framework at their application in the hopes that doing so would fix their program. It never seemed to occur to them to just sit down and actually understand the problem they were trying to solve. Occasionally I'll hear an excuse like "Waah, writing an SQL join is TOO HARD!" To which my response is, "It's still the most efficient way to do this, and IT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB!" If you don't think about the structure of your data, you're going to have a bad time. Nothing is a suitable replacement for knowing your tools, knowing your data and knowing the business process you're trying to automate with your program. Pff, kids these days.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?