Visual Studio 2013 Launches With New Online Tools, Browser-Based Code Editor | Hacker News Reader

Visual Studio 2013 Launches With New Online Tools, Browser-Based Code Editor

techcrunch.com

180 pointsjmacd53 comments

The Monaco project form Visual Studio is exciting. We (Codenvy) have tracked nearly 50 web-based editors that have emerged in the past 2 years. A few of them have transitioned into full businesses with venture backing. Most of them have remained side projects or experiments.

With Microsoft's project related to Monaco and their VP's statement in the TechCrunch article that this style of development is where the future is vectoring towards, this is the first major platform vendor that has indicated that they see these sorts of cloud environments as not only as supplemental to core development, but potentially displacements.

Of course, there are years of engineering ahead before cloud systems can offer true displacement, but some of the early adoption scenarios are getting well defined. We attempted to capture the market size and early adoption drivers of cloud browsers in this quora post.

http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-market-size-of-cloud-IDEs-a...

Is there a list of web-based editors beyond http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript-based_... ?

This is the list that I track and follow today. Apologies for any duplicates or typos. It's just my scratch pad list.

Of course my company, Codenvy should be in the list, too.

Koding (funded) CodeRun Eclipse Orion & Eclipse OrionHub Cloud9IDE CodeNow Nitrous.IO CodeCube ApplicationCraft Adobe Brackets.io UmbrellaSDK Vaadin Arvue TrackVia DevUnity Py I/O Web2Py Collide (GOOG) FriendCo.de WebStorm Coffee.io Cloudifier SWIFT Edit - England CodePen JSFiddle Dabblet Pastebin.me CSSDesk jsdo.it tinker SQL Fiddle Compilr Codeanywhere.net (funded) IDEOne PythonAnywhere Scalakata.com ideone.com onlinejavaide.com Kalupa Magikai Ninja-ide.org Microsoft TouchDevelop Notepad++ Codepen.io cloudenvy http://icecoder.net/ jackdb.com codio.com codebender.cc PythonMonk Hull.io maqetta Codebunk.com thebinaryapp.com editey.com brainengine http://www.crunchzilla.com/code-monster codiad goorm.io Microsoft Visual Studio Online Monaco

great overview at quora.com

are you estimating the market for such (Cloud-IDE) tools being currently $465M or did I misunderstood that - interesting when now the first key (legacy) development IDE providers (MS - VS) are moving towards that approach as well.

The size of the market in monetary measures depends upon how you define the market itself. If your definition are companies that provide Web-based editors or specifically IDEs with functionality specifically around edit / build / run / deploy, the market is very small today. But if you look at the broader cloud development market that includes code hosting, test, and some other functions that can sometimes be associated with IDEs, then that market is $465M and it's growing rather fast.

Very nice, we (Floobits YC S13) are also planning to integrate our web based editor with Visual Studio, with real time collaboration and the ability to connect to other types of native editors.

Our editor is based on the awesome ace editor and comes with unparalleled collaboration tools including webrtc video chat (and Google Hangout support), terminal sharing (flootty), automatic deployment tools (floomatic) and the ability to connect with your native editor with our editor plugins for Sublime Text, emacs and vim (intellij/webstorm/pycharm, etc in the works!). Git integration is also in the works.

I would also like to comment on this topic while pimping my company.

You're doing it wrong.

He (twiceaday YC14) is following these comments closely. He's using his literacy to enable real-time text-concept-memory translations, with the ability to verbally communicate the contents later, or simply re-type them if the ideas are relevant to later comment threads.

Think of it as "machine learning for humans."

Speculation here:

I wonder if Microsoft sees the fleeting profitability in owning the desktop environment (more competition, shrinking market, higher expectations). So they're trying to apply the same concepts that really helped propel windows as a popular platform (easy to develop for) to their cloud platform (azure) in an attempt to coax their existing user base to start adopting it over other cloud platforms (like google apps)

As a windows developer myself, I see this as a great strategy. I've been questioning staying with C# and windows for a few years now... it started with buying a Mac (while running Parallels) and learning several new languages. But I still LIKE C#. So it might be a great transition plan.

I don't think Microsoft yet sees the demise of desktop as a given, but they are hedging their bets against it. Web, mobile, cloud, &c. are all platforms that are threatening desktop. Microsoft is trying to push into them, not to abandon desktop, but to make sure that they have a foothold regardless of which platform(s) end up dominant in the future.

As late entrants into most of these platforms, their strategy is to leverage their existing technical capital as much as possible. So, we're seeing cloud versions of Outlook, Office, and now Visual Studio. I don't think they're trying to move people away from desktop (yet), but they are making their company's fate less tightly bound to desktop.

I'm wondering if a lot of moving their products to the cloud is to limit or try to stop pirating of their software. Adobe has been successful thus far with their new Creative Cloud platform.

Disclaimer: Not speaking in any official PR capacity here. Just sharing my personal opinions as a guy who has been in a bunch of cross-team meetings.

I've been working as a developer in Redmond in "Server & Tools", now called "Server & Cloud", for the better part of a year now. I know for a fact there are teams that work to address piracy, but I personally haven't seen it as a driving force in specific goals.

Without wanting to give away key strategy (not that I even know much) Look at how the company is structured and where the revenue comes from. Our division serves primarily enterprise customers. Enterprise customers are totally loving the cloud and are the primary driver of this demand. So we're focused on delivering a first-rate cloud platform (Azure) and first-rate developer tools (e.g. VS 2013 and cross platform Azure libs) to develop for it.

It seems to be working, our deployments are growing steadily. Public reports claim that we are deploying semicustom data center capacity in markets that impose some localized requirements.

Look at the investment in infrastructure capacity being made here. Such a fundamental shift wouldn't make sense (to me) for the goal of reducing the number of over-deployed licenses, when that could probably instead be addressed with far cheaper (even if annoying) DRM-like solutions.

So again, our customers told us they want cloud, so we're going to build them the best darn cloud ever, not forgetting our experience with their particular needs and requirements.

Pretty sure it's "Cloud and Enterprise."

D'oh! I'll have to be sure to get that right if I ever meet Satya.

Creative Cloud applications are still regular applications that are installed on your computer and can run offline.

I wonder if by hedging their bets they are actually accelerating the demise.

I worked at a couple big enterprise companies where all our installs of Visual Studio and dev tools were hosted on a separate secure network that we had to RDP into to do development. (Company had famous theft of source code).

I wonder if there's something to be said for getting web-based dev environments working well enough in a private cloud setting....I could see that as a future. And then the bonus of not even caring which device you access it from.

Virtualized Desktops are getting better, try to use Visual Studio with some form of PCoIP protocol (VmWare View) and you probably wont notice a difference to a real local desktop.

Modern virtualization capabilities somehow collide with the webapp approach and i wonder where this will go.

It can be as simple as not seeing enough revenue growth on the desktop. They have a lot of pressure to act like a growth company, whether they are or not.

Wow, I am blown away. It's worth watching their list of features video. http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Visual-Studio-Online-Monaco/...

Visual Studio Online is pretty cool! I've been using the git repository hosting for a while now and I am loving it. Free for up to five members and it's a private repo. Cool to see them continue to add more to it.

For anyone who downloaded (but has not installed) a VS2013 ISO from MSDN before November 8th might want to download again as they were updated on the 8th. Details on the update is available at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2890846/en-us

It's worth pointing out that they have Git support built in as well.

Wish it had Mercurial support, but at least it has TFS.

>Visual Studio Online - a set of development services running on Windows Azure that focus on agile team collaboration, Application Lifecycle Management and support for Windows Azure.

I don't see any online code editor here.

Please read the whole article.

>The other feature in private beta is codenamed “Monaco.” It’s a cloud-based code editor that enables lightweight editing for Windows Azure websites.

Ctrl-F "editor"

I didn't see it either, but it's there.

Without ReSharper, I find Visual Studio code editing to be a very unpleasant experience. I'm guessing the online editing will be even worse.

For a review of what's new in the IDE (not the VS Online portion): http://www.drdobbs.com/240163830

Deleted comment

Oh it's there: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2013/11/13/visual-.... The editor is called “Monaco”.

It looks pretty sweet. Microsoft has been very uniform in applying its flat design everywhere. I'm not always a fan of flat, but for the editor it works.

Yep, it's buried. I got smart and tried Ctrl-F "editor" :)

Forgive me for asking that $0.02 question : Can I create Xbox One apps with Visual studio ?

Traditionally the console SDKs are 'Visual Studio plus proprietary magic', so you'll need to get registered as a developer either way. But you'll almost certainly be using Visual Studio.

Okay - this actually looks very good. Almost like Sublime Text in the browser!

Am I the only one to notice this[1]? Looks pretty okay aside from that.

[1] http://uploads.woutervdb.com/files/5283a1c42f8bc.png

Fire. Everyone.

In other news - TechCrunch is now friends with Microsoft.

Does it only work in IE?

I don't think so. I'm using it in Chrome and it works perfectly fine. :)

You mean it works fine in NewIE, right? :)

(That's how most people I know that do front-end work have come to call Chrome and webkits in general as there are so many chrome/webkit specific bugs and "webkit-ish standard extensions" that it feels like debugging for IE back in the day. And nowadays Firefox and IE(10+) actually have more sane behaviors and more standard compliance than Chrome. Yeah, the Chrome devs bring new features to the people faster than anyone else, but they also introduce a shitload of specific bugs that are hard to fix because just reproducing them well enough to report them is a huge pain.)

Yes, it works fine in the NewIE as well. I've tested it in Chrome, FF, Safari, IE9+. All looks good so far.

Very convenient for hacking on the go when you are usually ng something like surface or iPad.

Ah, that's actually a great idea. Going to try it on my Surface RT :) It would be awesome if I could do some simple hacking on my tablet for those occasions I have to wait or when I'm in an airplane or something :)

IMO you can't really "hack" with the .net family of programming languages.

(hack as in tweak/mess around with your computer)

I like VS. It's a great product.

But why on earth Microsoft have to have a finger in every pie? Can't they just focus on some area and make some great products instead of trying to have monopoly in every little area and forcing or bullying everyone to user their product.

Just think about it, MS is most earning software company. But is there any field where MS is pioneer or revolutionize something? MS has monopoly in desktop but that's not for their quality of product, they just got lucky and IBM did some stupid mistakes. Windows is not a bad OS. But as the market leading OS, it's really mediocre. Even now Windows don't have basic feature like virtual desktops, a decent command shell, a good searching tool like "finder" in OS X.

> Even now Windows don't have basic feature like..

Hyper-V? Powershell? Search has been in Windows since forever.

Virtual desktops, not machines. That being said, those have been in Windows since at least NT4 as a feature of the window manager and plenty of implementations that use other mechanisms to work around the drawbacks of the native method (e.g. being able to move windows between desktops).

Do you know that Powershell is something they had to make to have something ti compete with native Shell, right?

This isn't a native feature for Windows and they have to monkey patch it.

If you have used anyother OS, you will find out that Windows is fundamentally broken.

I ran Gentoo as my main/desktop OS for a year or so. Have multiple machines that run ArchLinux and Ubuntu. I don't think Windows is fundamentally broken.

"This isn't a native feature for Windows"

That line makes no sense at all.

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