End of Life for Azure Notebooks | Hacker News Reader

End of Life for Azure Notebooks

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> We deeply value the Azure Notebooks community and all that was created over the past 4 years.

The headline and this sentence seem contradictory

They value it 6 feet deep.

https://killedbyms.com/

Who's still salty about Microsoft killing Zune and Windows Phone?

0.5 x /s

Windows Phone had its annoyances, but I wish they'd held onto it - particularly now with more and more M365 subscription-based ecosystem push. A highly securable device with solid versions of Office, Teams, Outlook, Authenticator and other MS-owned products could actually be viable, and if they keep on with the ARM-based Surface Pro X family then ARM-based processors in phones wouldn't be a big stretch.

Ironically, Windows Phones clients never fully supported Microsoft's enterprise line -- specifically, the 'Outlook' app did not support shared calendards or even multiple calendars associated with one account. Digging into the application revealed that it re-used an open-source syncing library instead of being a Microsoft-built implementation! Exchange support was the bulk of the appeal for the platform for me, and lack thereof is the reason I moved on to Android, where I had real support for a more full-featured toolset.

How were you able to dig into the appliaction? Is it possible to get Windows phone excecutables and decompile them using ilspy etc.?

Shortcomings in Outlook (or any of the Office apps really) seem like the kind of thing Microsoft would be in a position to fix with a little time investment - particularly if they're going to have those same apps on the Pro X not running in an emulator.

I've used multiple calenders per account without issue on my Windows phones.

Congratulations, I guess. That support was not present back when Microsoft had a chance at being taken seriously in the mobile space. It's moot now.

I've been using this feature since I started using Winphones back in 2015.

Which was right around the beginning of the end: https://www.statista.com/statistics/236034/global-smartphone...

By 2015, we're talking about Windows Phone 10. After 7, 8, and 8.1, the world was pretty much done with Windows Phone. Microsoft pulled the plug less than two years later.

On that list I only see a couple of things I could justify being salty about MS killing, and those two aren't it... both were already on life-support by being out competed.

You could argue in a round about way they were killed because they didn't execute competently or something, but several things on that list were either outcompeted or obsoleted by their environment (Silverlight => HTML5).

The problem most people have with Google is when products that are doing well and are well loved by many... but not up to Google scale standards

Wunderlist fits that description. They did replace it with To Do, which was made by the Wunderlist team, but technically not the same app

XNA does, but MonoGame picked up the slack

And of course... Microsoft Reader. That hideous Metro app that would try and open in full screen back in the early Windows Store days. Good riddance.

Who else remembers when MS held a funeral for iPhone to celebrate releasing windows phone? https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-celebrates-windows-p...

I do, and part of me was hoping that Google & Apple would have thrown a joint parade for the demise of Windows Phone, but classier minds prevailed…

Were there any phones based on WinCE before the iPhone? I liked the Pocket PC UI, it just needed a capacitive screen.

Yeah, plenty as my wife and I had several. It was looking for a while there like HTC was going to become Microsoft’s phone hardware branch. The phones were good enough that I failed to see the big deal about the iPhone. Other than the web browser, yawn. 2G Edge-only when my HTC 8125 had been using 3G for, I dunno, ever?

Then the iPhone 3G was released, and IMO that’s when iOS showed how wart-filled WinMo had become.

not "salty", since I never had one, but Windows Phone seemed like a good thing which at least locally was making some inroads when they gave up on it again.

I owned several. I would buy a $40 pre paid phone once a year and I never had any performance issues. I tried switching to a $40 android phone and it was basically unusable. My $500 Android is about as snappy as my prepaid windows phone.

There’s actually way less products than I thought would be on there.

It's just because nobody has contributed to that site. Microsoft has put two bullets in the back of the head of hundreds of products. Here's a different list:

https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

That site is a bit inaccurate in itself though, case in point

Microsoft Teams Progressive Web App https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-micros...

And also, it list things that were consolidated into other apps, I don't know you could say it was killed off, but more moved. (such as Microsoft groups, is just a part of outlook now, and not a standalone app)

Sure, but the criteria should be the same for everyone. The killedbygoogle site that people love spamming to HN comments has equally questionable entries.

Me, on Windows Phone, still my secondary phone and main one while traveling.

It’s theft-proof

RIP Zune

For everyone who doesn't work in the MS tech stack, this is pretty standard for the company.

I get the sense they're taking a "Manhattan project" approach to grabbing cloud share. They find every promising technology they can, and either try to re-implement in their ecosystem or support it.

Some of the stuff they're throwing at the wall sticks, and some of it doesn't.

True, however for old timers, the recurring politics between WinDev and DevDiv are starting to get tiring.

What's that? For non-old timers :P

WindDev owns Windows and C++ development related tooling, meanwhile DevTools is responsible for .NET and Visual Studio.

Since the introduction of .NET, when you seen Microsoft going all .NET, or having a cycle talking about why native is good and .NET should only be for LOB, it reveals which division is winning the political shots.

Some examples, Longhorn's failure, only to redo many of its ideas with COM in Vista, which ended up in WinRT.

WinRT/UWP looks suspiciously similar to ideas that gave birth to .NET, before it was decided to create a managed runtime instead (Ext-VOS) project.

Midori also proved it's capabilities by running part of Bing for a while, but it wasn't enough.

Joe Duffy has a remark on its Rustconf keynote, that even when proven wrong and given the opportunity to test drive Midori, the Windows team wasn't willing to change their mind.

Then you have them killing C++/CX in name of ISO compatibility, although UWP is anyway Windows only. So now DevDiv has to wait for the day ISO C++ supports the reflection and metaclasses, so that they can replicate the C++/CX tooling experience introduced in 2012.

More to the point, how many divs could a WinDev dev if a WinDev could dev divs?

I seen to remember the Manhattan project being a bit more single minded in it's focus. :)

They took multiple parallel approaches to bomb configuration and fissile element enrichment (at great expense) because they didn’t know what was going to work. Sort of like what’s happening with vaccines right now.

> The Azure Notebooks preview is ending on October 9th, 2020

Apparently they already shut down 2 weeks ago.

Any word on what's replacing it? Azure Machine Learning notebooks?

Just GitHub codespaces that has built in support for vscode's jupyter notebook support. It's a much more general solution.

Has anyone tried Python notebooks in VSCode Online?

I didn't know about GitHub code spaces with Jupyter support.

Azure ML Notebooks provide pretty similar functionality.

Is this EOL for just the "preview" or for the whole thing?

"On January 15th, 2021 the Azure Notebooks public preview site will be retired and replaced with integrated services from Visual Studio, Azure, and GitHub. Learn about your options and Microsoft's other notebook experiences at https://notebooks.azure.com/Content/alternatives.html."

They forgot https://colab.research.google.com/. :). But then again, it's a Google service with a fairly niche audience, so you know the deal...

So I haven't ever used this service, so I might not be framing the question correctly - but what I guess I mean is: are the alternative integrated services actually the initially intended final form of the product post preview? Or is the project itself just being cancelled and users being pointed to subpar substitutes - like Google with the trusted contacts thing where they killed the feature and pointed to an inferior alternative in maps as a way to placate users.

I find an end of life notice on a git repository weird somehow. I guess it's a notice to start forking, really.

The beginning of the end of all these free notebook services scare me. I haven't found any good alternative to Google Colab that allows private notebooks.

Its disappointing and was announced a while ago.

I really wish they would have kept it alive much longer... Azure Machine Learning is way more complex and Codespaces not yet available for normal people.

Only free alter alternative with private Notebooks is Colab.

Paperspace Gradient is awesome, but the free version requires public Notebooks.

Visual Studio Codespaces (part of Azure) exists and you can sign up for it. It's basically the same product as GitHub Codespaces except slightly less tied to GitHub. The reason they don't mention it in this post is because it's being turned down in a few months, after the public launch of GitHub Codespaces.

Hi, please see my comment below[0]. We welcome your feedback.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838011

Did Azure Notebooks have anything proprietary beyond Jupyter notebooks? If not, not a huge deal - can still take away all of your content and rerun elsewhere :)

Darn. I literally just tried these out and liked it okay. Some random UX issues but nothing deal breaking.

I think you'll like our platform[0][1]:

- No setup Jupyter notebooks

- Collaborative notebook editing

- Publish notebook into AppBooks (parametrized notebooks) that allow you to deploy the resulting model, track experiments, etc. This also enables people unfamiliar with Notebooks to use it as an application without being overwhelmed, and tweak models.

- Schedule notebooks and see their output live, even if you close the browser. Your notebooks are run on a much beefier machine than when you're in interactive mode. You won't have the problem of a training job where you don't get the result because of a lost connection.

- Automatic model detection and saving, parameter/metrics tracking

- One click model deployment

- Multiple notebook checkpoints (revert back and forth to previous saved versions)

Caveat emptor: as you may notice, we're not focusing on embellishing notebooks as we believe, from what we have experienced, that the fact machine learning projects take a long time is not for lack of beautiful stylesheets. We'll tackle these problems at a later time.

- [0]: https://iko.ai

- [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmachinelearning/comments/je0pm...

Hmm, I interviewed to be on this team. Was turned down because I'm not super double plus good kubernetes pro and because I didn't want to move to Redmond.

The guys I talked to during the process were all pretty cool, hope they land on their feet.

I used this a few years ago during a time when I NEVER had a stable computer (going to libraries, using a friend's PC, et cetera). Didn't use it much after that, but it saved me in a pinch. RIP.

Usually the first time I hear about cool services like this is when they are shutting down. ;-(

Ugh, it's like Reader all over again.

Time for someone to start killedbymicrosoft.com? ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838237

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