A rich new JavaScript code editor spreading to several Microsoft web sites | Hacker News Reader

A rich new JavaScript code editor spreading to several Microsoft web sites

hanselman.com

221 pointsDevKoala69 comments

Every once in a while Microsoft still does something exactly right. And it makes me wistfully sad for all of the missed opportunities.

Yes, I was one of those who did an all-nighter outside a store waiting for win95.

Re: 95, turns out it was easy to just get on to the beta list. Reminds me of a funny story...

Summer of '95, I was sitting at the weekly roundtable meeting of our IT department (at an R&D lab I used to work), and explaining to the boss that I could get my hands on a new beta of it from a friend so we could kick the tires. The whole team seemed interested and leaned in. "So," the boss says, "Who is your friend... he must be some VIP at a big operation, eh?"

"Nope," shaking my head.

"Well, who?" asks the boss.

"He's a high-school student."

"BWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAahahah...."

Personally it reminds me of the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, which I hate quite a lot. This is partly because it is why it took until Win95 for 32-bit programming to become popular, not to mention that the tactics MS used to attack OS/2 got worse and more unethical as Chicago/Win95 got delayed. See my blog post: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-...

MS OS/2 2.0??? 2.0 was long after the split with MS, I think you mean IBM os/2. Also 32 bit programming had been around for a long time before Microsoft got around to it. Os/2 had protected mode 32 bit in 1992, and PC hardware had been running 386 based 32 but unix variants since the mid 80's. even before that the 68000 had been running unix in 32 bit. Just because the win32 programming crowd didn't get to play with 32bit (and the joys of thunking) until '95 doesn't mean it was popular for a long time before.

I linked to the original MS OS/2 2.0 SDK announcement at the beginning of the blog article: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1989-...

Apparently I was not the only high school student on the 95 beta.

I wonder now if i was the only one to crash our entire novell network by trying to use Microsoft's version of the novell client.

I used to crash a Novell network by doing design changes on MS Access tables with lots of rows.

>I was one of those who did an all-nighter outside a store waiting for win95.

I remember coming across a picture from that day [1] and thinking to myself how similar the excitement is to the modern day product release from Apple. Yes Microsoft has become the company everyone loves to hate but I think they were considered cool or hip back then.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/4Ng1ELA.jpg

Not me, I was an OS/2 holdout for a year or so. Superior networking you see.

Actually, they do a lot right. That's why 9 out of 10 businesses on the planet use their operating system.

I really enjoy typing with this text editor. It feels just right: nice colorscheme, nice cursor width, nice bracket matching and code highlighting. I hope MS makes a native windows 8 app using the code editor or give it under a free licence it so that other can make the app.

Have they announced this anywhere? If not, when are they firing their marketing department?

This video was on reddit/r/programming recently but only got two upvotes. I feel it's worth more attention than that.

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Text-Editor-from-SkyDrive-wit...

Edit: It's had almost 30,000 views, so it's getting attention.

I had missed it. Thank you.

Suprisingly enough, this really is the release announcement. This is their marketing department.

Scott Hanselman ... Microsoft employee.

It's Microsoft's new marketing strategy - they try to promote 'organic growth and acceptance' of new products through social media and viral advertising. I don't believe it works very well - it always comes across as a bit false and pollutes the real comment environment, giving viewers the strange feeling that something is wrong. It also creates a lot of antagonism when paid employees actually argue with detractors, etc.

What a load of rubbish. Scott Hanselman has been blogging on these sorts of things for years before he ever joined Microsoft, and always tries to maintain his independence in his blogging and podcasting regardless of employer.

Respectfully, that's nonsense. I don't even work in their department. I've been online for 20+ years, blogging for like 12 years and I've worked at MS for 6.

The blog is a blog. This post is just a post. I get in trouble for blogging a few times a year, and that suits me just fine. It's just a job.

OT, but on the .NET Framework versioning, the support lifecycle of 2.0/3.0/3.5 is a mess that needs to be cleaned up:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2696944

The lifecycle policy of 3.5 SP1 should also be applied to 3.0 SP2 and 2.0 SP2, for example.

Thanks, I've sent this note to the Lifecycle guy and I'll get you a response.

Thanks for the feedback Yuhong. As you correctly pointed out .NET 2.0 SP2 and .NET 3.0 SP2 are sub-components of .NET 3.5 SP1 so it makes sense to have these on the same lifecycle. The good news is that this is already the case, the Knowledge Base Article 2696944 clarifies that when .NET 3.5 SP1 is installed the same lifecycle will apply to .NET 2.0 SP2 and 3.0 SP2 too.

This is the relevant snippet from that KB article -

...snip...

However, Microsoft will provide support for the .NET Framework 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0 components for customers who install the .NET Framework 3.5 for as long as the .NET Framework 3.5 remains in support.

...snip...

Thanks, Jamshed Program Manager, .NET Framework Fundamentals team

But why 2.0 SP2 and 3.0 SP2 has a different lifecycle if 3.5 SP1 is installed vs if it is not installed?

OT, but do you think you could point me in the direction of whoever's responsible for WPL/AntiXSS? It's been broken for ages [1] [2]. There seem to be no reliable HTML sanitization library for .NET right now. It looks like the best I could do is to copy and paste a bunch of code and hope that it works [3].

[1] http://wpl.codeplex.com/releases/view/80289#ReviewsAnchor

[2] http://wpl.codeplex.com/workitem/17246

[3] http://eksith.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/whitelist-santize-htm...

Let me ask around. It's handled by a group that isn't ASP.NET.

Any effort is appreciated. Thank you.

Thank you for your blog, the posts are always entertaining and informative :)

Wow, Mr Hanselman himself.

I'm a big fan - listen to all episodes of your podcast. Just watched a few presentations from this year Build. You should really give other MS employees a course on public speaking - they are sooo slow and boring compared to you ;-)

He's got a course on public speaking available on TekPub.

Er, is that why the screenshots use Google Chrome?

The official release announcement (at the bottom of the post):

http://blogs.windows.com/skydrive/b/skydrive/archive/2013/07...

In http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2013/3-314 around 00:54:40 Anders Hejlsberg mentions that there is a team in Switzerland working on that editor, and it is written in TypeScript.

It is at 53:40+.

I just installed SkyDrive to try it out. I already had an account for my VS Express 2012 so in under 30 seconds I was editing a file and trying the code completion. It looks good and works well, so it's a nice offering from the Microsoft coders. (Gee, I sound like a marketing shill but I'm not, I just happen to love TypeScript and Visual Studio, although TS failed me in a surprising way today - but this isn't the post for that.)

How does it compare to Ace and CodeMirror?

[0] http://ace.c9.io

[1] http://codemirror.net

I freaking love c9. But I will try out the MS thing.

That's hard to say until they actually release documentation. When I first noticed it [1] 10 months ago, it seemed very flaky and slow, but it appears to have improved a lot in the meantime.

[1]: https://twitter.com/marijnjh/status/252814288891285505

Still, it's closed source, so for now, not very relevant for the rest of us.

So, no tern.js for them until it's open source :)

I'd love to know their motivation for writing their own instead of contributing to Ace or CodeMirror.

Amazing.

Has anyone used this? Does it reference symbols across files? I imagine it would be rather expensive to actually have a compiler front-end running live in the cloud across my project.

    not quite intellisense, as it's just one file at a time

What exactly is "amazing" about it?

This is the sort of functionality that has been made available by numerous text editors and IDEs for numerous programming languages for many, many years now.

It's somewhat unusual to see how so many in the JavaScript and web development communities can get so excited about catching up to where basically everybody else was decades ago. It'd be one thing if JavaScript and web development were new creations, but they're not.

While this may be useful in some cases, it's surely not "amazing".

Did you also look at Google Docs when it first came out and remark that gamers have been playing together online in the same arena for years?

IntelliJ is my IDE. I'm excited about this because it's in a web application, not because I've never seen code completion before.

I looked at Google Docs when it first came out and it reminded me of something I saw in 1968.

I'm intrigued. Can you describe this 1968 product? What was it called?

I'm pretty sure he's referring to 'The mother of all demos' by Ebgelbart, where he demonstrated live collaborative document editing among dozens of ludicrously ahead of its time software features. [1]

That said, I disagree with the larger point the op is making. When you work in a technical field you tend to figure out the tool for a task, grin and near through a finicky setup process and then dismissing improvements that reduce that friction as trivial/unimportant, even though those improvements mean its able to solve the problem for an exponentially larger market.

A classic example is rsync and dropbox. It's less pronounced here, but the more advanced web code editors get, the longer someone interested in the topic can mess around and try things out without setting up a local dev environment (multiple hours of totally unfun work if you're a novice), the more likely they are to stay interested and push through and get over that hump when the time comes.

[1]The video(100% worth watching) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY Wikipedia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

This is not the only online IDE or the first :)

c9.io codenvy.com nitrous.io

When I first looked at Google Docs, it reminded me of the desktop office suites I had used back in the early 1990s.

The core functionality was, and still is, quite limited. In some cases it's still inferior to what those early office suites offered.

The ability to access and share documents over a network is nothing new. We did it all the time back then. There was even software back then that enabled collaborative editing of documents, in real-time.

For all the hype we hear about how great JavaScript is as a programming language, and how great web apps are, we just don't see that translating to improved software.

When these web apps don't offer anything beyond what we had with desktop software decades ago (and in many cases are even worse), it's hard to get excited about them, and it's impossible to consider them to be "amazing".

>It's somewhat unusual to see how so many in the JavaScript and web development communities can get so excited about catching up to where basically everybody else was decades ago.

If you can run your IDE in a browser, it means you can access your IDE (and presumably your code) from any computer or mobile device with a browser (it also naturally opens up certain use-cases like google docs-style collaboration). That's what makes it special. Do you not get it?

We made one of those at HP/Palm for building webOS applications in Enyo. It was called Ares. It was rad.

Alas, HP's CEO in 2011 was mind-bogglingly stupid and of course, killed off Palm

>HP's CEO in 2011 was mind-bogglingly stupid and of course, killed off Palm

Oh Yeah.

What's happening with Enyo these days anyway? It looks like the project is kinda dead.

Looks like the (very impressive) editor on their Try F# site (which serves as a great introduction to the language, providing you with a scratchpad/REPL and output window for in browser coding): http://www.tryfsharp.org/

Yep, that's the same editor (Monaco). This can be easily verified by checking the HTML.

Related discussion on codeplex (typescript specific): http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/401549

And a ACE/typescript integration with code validation and autocomplete: http://guillaume86.github.io/ace/kitchen-sink.html (switch to typescript mode in the left panel).

There's also this one based on node.js and Ace... There is a github and you can install on your own server.. I'm using it as a private interactive pastebin/code snippet editor etc on a vps of mine.. Just need to put an apache ssl reverse proxy with basic auth in front of it and I'll be good to go..

http://codeintune.com/

Tried the editor at http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/ and there is one very annoying thing. I cannot type the closing curly brace ("}") on a non-us keyboard layout (Alt Gr+ N). Other than that, it's good.

I talked with someone internally that works on this, he said:

I can type { and } on a Swiss keyboard which is a AltGr + ä and AltGr + $.

What keyboard layout were you seeing issues with? Looking at Wikipedia it looks like it would be South Slavic Latin based on your mention of Alt Gr+N?

You can mail me privately if you wish (mail in profile).

The inline threaded comments look like an awesome feature, would be amazing to have an inline widget like that in Code Mirror. Submitting tiny local patches this way might be useful, too :D

Editing is good and fine..but can i preview my changes directly??

The code editor does not appear to work at all for me with IE 8.

doesn't have vi mode

Any good online editors with vi mode out there?

Codemirror reigns

http://codemirror.net/demo/vim.html

Cloud9 does: https://c9.io/

Cloud9 IDE is a whole service. The actual editor behind Cloud9 is Ace (http://ace.c9.io/#nav=about).

You can try out Ace’s Vim keybindings by opening the kitchen sink demo (http://ace.c9.io/build/kitchen-sink.html) and choosing “Vim” as the Key Binding on the left.

There needs to be a good online editor before there can be a good online editor with vi mode.

right

Both good online editors have it.

(Ace and CodeMirror).

http://gpl.internetconnection.net/vi/

And, for completeness, Emacs:

http://www.ymacs.org/demo/

As Admiral Ackbar would say: "It's a trap!"

Unless you're committed to MS anyway.

Great.. How even more script kiddies can practice...

Are you opposed to practicing?

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