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."

plus ça change

[TechNeilogy]

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!”

[Serious] Who's Using Azure And For What

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:[Serious] Who's Using Azure And For What

[tgd]

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
- We also make good use of TFService (now Visual Studio Online) -- 80% of the code in it being Java code not .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.

The question of why Azure vs AWS/Google? That's a tougher one ... but briefly:
- 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 ... basically its the whole package rather than bits and pieces.

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.

Do they offer free CPU time for compiling?

[Lumpy]

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.