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."

It *is* an IDE

[seizer]

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 [msdn.com] for a few videos of the thing in action.

Re:All your sources...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this a Troll???

Wasn't Microsoft in the 80's and 90's stealing everyone's else ideas in the embrace, extend, and extinguish?

Now that they have your source code too, they skip the embrace, go straight to the extend with little problem and then extinguish what ever website you were planning on launching.

Remember that Microsoft is notorious for stealing other people's ideas. Don't make it easier for them.

Funnily Enough

[Greyfox]

I was helping a friend debug an assembly language function the other day. Now I haven't touched assembly in a couple of decades and in the course of helping him I remembered why, but that's another story. Anywhoo I took his function, googled on the gcc calling convention, added a few lines to pull parameters off the stack from a C call and wrote a C program to set the memory up and call it. After seeing that it segfaulted, I dropped the application into gdb and quickly found a couple of conditions he hadn't taken into account in a loop. This was causing memory pointers to go all over the place and subsequently be written to. I sent him back my notes on where his function was going wrong and the output of the C program. His response was something to the effect of "How did you do that?!"

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.

Re:All your sources...

[DickBreath]

> Wasn't Microsoft in the 80's and 90's stealing everyone's else ideas in the embrace, extend, and extinguish?

Not just ideas. Actual code. Remember back to MS-DOS 6.0 and Stack Electronics? You can Google it. You may not remember, and I think the Wikipedia article is too kind in omitting some details.

And this is just part of the long history of Microsoft being evil. I find it amusing when youngsters don't understand why people who've been in the computer industry for a long time don't like Microsoft. They just don't know the company's history.

Extra credit: research Internet Explorer and Spyglass. (Short story: Microsoft wakes up and smells the Internet, OMG! it's not just a 'fad' and it's not going away. Mac and Unix already have mature browsers, and third parties have browsers on Windows. Do something! Find a company making an internet browser on Windows. Enter Spyglass which makes the Spyglass browser. Spyglass wants some money. Microsoft negotiates with them to buy it for $100,000 up front, with a royalty percent of all sales. Guess how many copies of Internet Explorer that Microsoft 'sells' ? What does a royalty rate multiplied by zero work out to?)

Or look up Sendo phones. Before the ink is dry on the contract, Microsoft proceeds to start putting Sendo out of business so that Microsoft can exercise a contractual term giving Microsoft all of Sendo's intellectual propety if Sendo goes out of business.

Or Microsoft backstabbing their partner IBM?

But this is but a few examples. There are plenty more.

Re:Sounds fantastic!

[DickBreath]

> I think MS has discovered a worse way to write code than using notepad! Bravo!

Um, sir, I think you have forgotten about Edlin.