Microsoft Releases Browser-Based IDE, Visual Studio Online 89
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."
Re:What is... (Score:5, Informative)
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.