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."
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What is lmgtfy.com?
Re:What is... (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=cache:lmgtfy.com&l=1 [lmgtfy.com]
Warning: if you follow that recursive link you'll crash the googles and all our internets will stop.
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Is that a bad thing?
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.
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I think that you have it backwards. I always understood that Azure was the general branding of Microsoft's cloud services, and that it started as a framework to run applications in the cloud with BLOB storage. Then as time went on, they added to the menu of available services, including Azure VMs, Azure Active Directory, Azure Kitchen Sink, etc. Basically, Microsoft is moving towards having a cloud version of the majority of it's business offerings, and most of them will be under the Azure brand. It's o
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What is... Windows Azure?
Potatoes, you know? (Boil e'm, mash them, stick them in a stew)
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Boil e'm, mash them, stick them in a stew
Given it's price in our state (WB, India), I would rather store it in a locker as investment.
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Boil e'm, mash them, stick them in a stew
Given it's price in our state (WB, India), I would rather store it in a locker as investment.
Try using some soil. With a bit of care, you may finish with a good return of investment YoY.
All your sources... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:All your sources... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Don't then, you don't have to.
It's not as if this is anything new, you can already deploy to Azure using Git et al, so people are already pushing source code up.
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Funny how MS is evil (non ethical). All businesses are evil because they do whatever it takes to stay on top. Google was smart as they delivered a complete solution quickly that could not be overturned overnight due to the nature of it's business. If you are the first to make a blue pen and everybody sees your success, everybody else will make a blue pen and steal some or all of your business. This trend is fairly common at the retail level.
In the end the big guy often eats the small guy. Innovation combine
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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.
Wikipedia actually says something very different from what you claim:
"Microsoft had originally sought to license the technology from Stac Electronics, which had a similar product called Stacker, but these negotiations had failed. Microsoft was later successfully sued for patent infringement by Stac Electronics for violating some of its compression patents. During the court case Stac Electronics claimed that Microsoft had refused to pay any money when it attempted to license Stacker, offering only the possib
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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?)
A bad business decision by Spyglass does not make MS evil. MS paid them the money mutually agreed upon. The contract did not demand MS price the browser, nor did it provide provisions to handle bundling the browser for free.
You also seem to be mis-remembering some details. Per wiki, the browser was not purchased, but licensed with quarterly fees + royalties (with the royalties ending up at 0). That tells you they had an ongoing licensing contract that could be re-negotiated if Spyglass was unsatisfi
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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.
I can't believe this idiocy is modded up as insightful.
What, exactly, makes VS Online any different from GitHub in this context? You're basically saying that no-one should make anything FLOSS, because otherwise teh evil Microsoft will come and "embrace-extend-extinguish".
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IDE or Azure control panel? (Score:3)
I don't see an editor in the linked stories. In the setup instructions http://www.visualstudio.com/get-started/connect-to-vs#connectvs [visualstudio.com] it says "5. Now you're ready to check in source, queue builds, and manage work." which sounds like a control panel, not an IDE. This also requires VS2013 which doesn't exactly make it "Browser-Based".
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Well VS2013 gives you the option of signing up to an account when you first load it so I'm guessing you're probably right, it's probably just integration.
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It *is* an IDE (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
plus ça change (Score:5, Interesting)
Sounds fantastic! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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See this: T-Mobile Sidekick Disaster: Danger's Servers Crashed, And They Don't Have A Backup [techcrunch.com]
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Re:Sounds fantastic! (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, sir, I think you have forgotten about Edlin.
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You don't really know yet. These kinds of projects usually stem from customer demand. I'm no fan of this concept but depending how it's implemented I can see the potential for web development. Currently if I want to work from home I can either work remotely via RDC or I can reproduce the environment locally. Both solution are slow because we can't afford bigger bandwidth and the local solution requires more maintenance. God forbid I get a call about an issue with the live DB where I have to connect directly
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I'm on DSL, you insensitive clod!
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Nice example of insecure code at their login screen (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=309297&clcid=0x409&slcid=0x409):
What if InsertOrUpdate() or Save() fails? Lesson number one in secure programming: ALWAYS check return codes of functions.
Yes, you're smarter than the people who wrote and reviewed it.
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Okay since I got modded Flamebait -- and it wasn't intended as a flame, it was intended to be a specific sarcastic response suggesting the OP was an idiot -- I'll follow up.
Lesson number one in secure programming is to know where your threat boundaries are. A statement about checking return codes all the time, and its association with security, is just plain moronic because there may not be a threat at that point in the code. In this case, you're authenticating via services that need valid credentials to ge
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Yes, very often.
Which implies, not always.
Which is kind of the GP's point.
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This is Microsoft. Their software never fails.
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Nice example of insecure code at their login screen (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=309297&clcid=0x409&slcid=0x409):
What if InsertOrUpdate() or Save() fails? Lesson number one in secure programming: ALWAYS check return codes of functions.
I'm curious, in which lesson do we learn about security boundaries and contexts?
If you are such a security expert, please tell us why would you expect to find security assertions in client-side JavaScript code?
I can tell you that security decisions should never be performed client-side, and you expectation to find such code is utterly revealing.
[Serious] Who's Using Azure And For What (Score:2, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Thank you for your response. You are exactly the type of user I wanted to hear from.
If I may ask, what do your servers do? Enterprise services, web application, customer facing, ecommerce?
Bit of all of that -- a web application, public and internal services supporting it, some enterprise integration (WAAD/ACS federation, etc), and a couple corporate websites running WordPress.
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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.
Compared to which AWS support tier? I've never had a problem with their Enterprise support.
As I mentioned, its been a while, so I don't recall... and it may be less of a differentiator now, so that may have been a bit stronger of a statement than it should've been. I'm comfortable saying its, at worst, equal... but that'd be a BIG compliment to Amazon/Google. (And, Google support has been a trainwreck every time I've tried to interact with them, so... I would be SHOCKED if its gotten any better.)
Do they offer free CPU time for compiling? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Or swordfight [xkcd.com]? (You knew this link would be posted. Don't lie to me.)
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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.
Oh come now, compiling can't really be your #1 time waster. There's a whole bunch of other good ones out there, like Software Load times (MS Office, Visual Studio), Solitaire, and Slashdot.
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Nope all that happens while I compile... Granted I compile after every line of code I add.....
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From the blog post [msdn.com]:
"Every Visual Studio Online account provides 60 minutes of free build time per month, making it friction free to get started with hosted build. "
So some free time, but probably not enough for project of any reasonable size. Basically more like a free trial.
Funnily Enough (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Funnily Enough (Score:5, Funny)
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So lets take a horrible desktop IDE and make it available online! Visual Studio is a laughing stock of IDE's, it's overly complex, over bloated, expensive, complicated to use and just an amature attempt at an IDE.
I'm a Visual Studio fanboy and mostly like the IDE for what it provides, but I agree with you that it's too bloated. The startup time and many of the operations are ridiculously slow. Goes to same bin with Ubuntu's Unity desktop in terms of performance.