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Submitted via IRC for chromas
Microsoft wants developers to start coding in the cloud
As software developers, we tend to get pretty attached to the IDE we use. And it's not hard to see why -- it's the tool we rely on the most, which enables us to create fantastic products and be productive while doing so.
And this can create a problem when we're faced with a change in our flow. We do not like change. Don't get me wrong. Change is great -- as long as it's not happening on our machines. Microsoft, however, doesn't mind a challenge, as it just unveiled Visual Studio Online. Like its name suggests, it's an IDE in the browser. Unlike its name suggests, that's only a small part of it.
Visual Studio Online is basically a service for software developers, which enables users to spin up dedicated environments "for long-term projects, to quickly prototype a new feature, or for short-term tasks like reviewing pull requests."
I am sure that at some point later down the road Microsoft will find a better name for it. Probably one that includes Azure in it -- because that's where those environments live in. But, for now, as it's in the public preview phase, it'll have to do.
[...] One thing to note here is that there will also be a browser-based version of Visual Studio for this -- the Visual Studio part of Visual Studio Online I mentioned in the beginning. It's not ready for prime time yet, but it should come in handy when you're just looking to do some quick work -- at least at first I don't expect it to work as a replacement for its on-premises brothers.
All this makes me wonder if we are not looking at a shift in how we develop software. After all, if the software we create can live in the cloud, why can't the programs we write be designed there as well?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @02:42PM (13 children)
.. you need to pay them monthly to keep access to
yourtheir code (the eula probably states somewhere that all code written on their platform will be their IP).(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @02:58PM (4 children)
And suddenly stop providing you service if you ever piss off the wrong people.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:20PM (1 child)
All you've got to do, to stay "right", is to eat a little CoCk.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:24PM
The problem with cloud based IDEs: they will cut off your, um . . . service, for suggesting it is little.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by WeekendMonkey on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:13PM
Or if your country is out of favour with the current president.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driverless on Friday November 08 2019, @03:23AM
... or a certificate expires. Or Azure goes down again. Or there's a network outage. Or you're out of coverage. Or...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by zion-fueled on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:48PM
Even if the EULA doesn't take ownership over your code, what is to stop them from looking and putting in their closed source products. Its not like you can prove they used it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @04:39PM
IOW: all your code are belong to us
(Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:09PM
The benefits of this plan don't really line up for personal use the way they do for corporate use.
Corporate users want to be able to distribute completely functional environments to code monkeys that might know how to write a web app or a React front-end but would spend weeks figuring out how to get all the languages, frameworks, and tools installed and integrated correctly.
Corporate users also will have legal departments prepared to ensure that Microsoft does not own their code. They've already got something worked out for Office 365; from what I recall, the setup is basically that the enterprise gets a private, auditable space in Azure that runs Microsoft code but is not accessible to Microsoft employees (any more than anything on Azure, of course).
Which is not to say that this is all sunshine and roses. The code ownership piece is just not what we should be worried about yet.
What's actually troubling about this is that if it picks up steam, we may lose the capability outside the most FOSS-dedicated spaces to actually set up our own build environments.
Once the vast majority of software writers only know how to write code for Visual Studio Online's pre-packaged build environments, and not how those build environments actually work, that's when we should worry. Because that's when Microsoft can start changing the terms of service exactly as you describe.
Not that it's terribly likely for Microsoft to keep from f*cking it up long enough to actually become dominant. In the grand scheme of things, the dominance of Windows in the 90s was a fluke of backroom deals with businesspeople that didn't understand what they were giving away. Businesspeople today are more savvy to the potential for massive technological disruption, and there are more savvy big players in the market than there used to be.
You can bet that if Microsoft proves the idea, Google and Apple will swoop in with their own massively superior implementations. Then, like now, there will still be Microsoft shops that use Visual Studio Online exclusively, but most people will be in Google's orbit except when they need to deal with iOS.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:40PM (1 child)
Another advantage to MS with this: they get a look at *everybody*'s code who is dumb enough to use this, so they can go ahead and patent any good ideas they happen to find before their creators do.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @06:41PM
Not only that, but in the State of Washington, otherwise known as "The Bait State", the 'cloud' serves as a dragnet for LEA-tards hunting the root of all evil, single white males.
How to steal an American city: Montes v. City of Yakima - https://www.aclu-wa.org/cases/montes-v-city-yakima-0 [aclu-wa.org]
Embezzlement & swindling at the state level: McCleary, et al. v. State of Washington - Supreme Court Case Number 84362-7: https://www.courts.wa.gov/appellate_trial_courts/supremecourt/?fa=supremecourt.mccleary_education [wa.gov]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:12PM
Why do you think they bought GitHub? It is a way to extract money out of small companies that were using GitHub for free, or to simply squash open source projects they don't like.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:48PM (1 child)
Wait until . . . .
Microsoft Plays For Sure would never abruptly cancel the service.
New improved promise: Microsoft Zune would never abruptly cancel the service.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @02:33AM
Well, in all fairness, anyone who bought a Zune was a complete moron.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by fadrian on Thursday November 07 2019, @02:48PM (3 children)
Inertia and lack of tools. You'll hear people bitching about security, ownership, etc., but honestly, big cloud provides better in security than your own dumb dev-ops team will ever have the time to do and as far as ownership goes, you can always keep backups. So yeah, they'll bitch about other things, but it's really inertia.
That is all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:02PM
You mean these backups?
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/backup/ [microsoft.com]
Yeah , that should save you
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:06PM
Cloud is more secure and reliable...IF AND ONLY IF correctly configured. When there is no "dumb devops team" then developers do it.
(Score: 2) by NickM on Thursday November 07 2019, @04:24PM
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:15PM (3 children)
I can see numerous downsides including absolute dependence on a third party company, trust issues, security issues, reliability issues (e.g. - even google cloud has gone down and outrages seem to be becoming more frequent over time, not less), and countless others. And of course in the longrun, this is little more than rent seeking behavior. Microsoft's goal is to start charging a monthly fee and you'll be subject to the whims of their profiteering as opposed to owning your software.
It's easy to point to the negatives, but what major benefits are there? I am really having difficulty coming up with any. Team development is very practically a solved problem so going to "the cloud" doesn't seem to have much to offer there. And even the native visual studio already has built in support for things like remote debugging, remote builds, etc. Even if it didn't I'd hardly consider those huge benefits since they're handy when you need them, but it's a pretty esoteric use case. And practical things like building on multiple machines is, again, a solved problem: it's called a pull.
Not really bashing on Microsoft, I am an unabashed Visual Studio addict. I just don't see any benefit whatsoever to 99% of things hosted on "cloud" servers, and this is definitely among them.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:26PM
> and outrages seem to be becoming more frequent over time
I see ---^ what you did there!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:39PM
If you are on a very slow internet connection, not needing to move big blocks of code through the network may be an advantage. And you locally don't need a powerful computer, as all the compiling happens in the cloud.
Otherwise, I guess Microsoft will sooner or later offer features on VS online that they don't offer to offline users (even though they could), just to make the online version more attractive. It won't be an inherent advantage of the cloud, but it will be an advantage of the cloud product over the non-cloud product. And I guess the ultimate goal is to eventually retire the non-cloud versions. In which case, the big advantage of the cloud version is that it is actively maintained and developed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @03:51AM
Compiling could be very fast. It could be very fast locally too, if everyone on the development team had something like distcc, but that isn't common. For really large applications this could make a big difference. It takes hours to build Chromium from scratch, for example, and while naturally Google won't be using this, there are applications in the real world where build time is a serious factor.
I guess it could be nice for remote work, assuming the company trusts Microsoft more than their own employees. You can give your remote developers access to your Microsoft account without having to worry about what development environment they have at home, and without ever letting them actually have the code at home (as if that would stop anyone from stealing it if they wanted to).
Since Microsoft development environments for professional use are already pretty expensive I'm not seeing any obvious price change, but of course they could sneak in a price increase at the same time. I don't really remember Office 365 being much more expensive than just constantly upgrading to the latest version of Office, but it's more expensive than just buying it once.
I think worries about Microsoft stealing your code are overblown, but it's not insane to worry about it.
Mostly, I think Microsoft is just hoping they can dangle a little up front convenience in the hopes of getting lock-in. That's really what cloud is about, lock-in. Whoever has the data has the power.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:21PM (1 child)
I have always been awed by people who write software for Win32. Software development is a fairly masochistic endeavor anyway. Doing it on a platform where the underlying dependencies are changed to fuck over third party developers ON PURPOSE is a whole other thing.
On *nix you code, then maintain to compensate for bitrot. On Windows you code, then maintain to compensate for bitrape. There is a difference.
The scary thing is that there are probably congressmen out there demanding that this become the compulsory model. Of course eventually bots will get sophisticated enough to just replace them. Why pay some asshole a million dollars so you can stick your hand up his ass and make his lips move, when you can just compile a patch?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:44PM
My most recent project, begun over a decade ago, I went with all open source. I have the source code to my entire stack. Java. Apache Tomcat. Eclipse. All of the third party libraries I use, including front end JavaScript. And I pay attention to the licenses to ensure compliance.
I would say I'm not dependent on the mercies of Microsoft. I can laugh at the VB developers when Microsoft lost interested and C# and DOT NET were the new shiny. Then VB.NET as the poor (and incompatible!) stepchild. Laugh at the Visual FoxPro developers when Microsoft lost interest in that. What happened to COM? MFC?
Platform portability and open source are real winners. My entire stack runs on Linux as easily as Windows. I had to make the right decisions early on, but I find myself in what I think is an enviable position now. Things that were a bit controversial (open source!) are now all the rage. Oh, gee, Java is and has been for years the number one programming language. Microsoft is now embracing (OMG) Linux. It all makes me chuckle at the early naysayers.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by donkeyhotay on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:41PM (3 children)
This is consistent with the way things are going. I've spent the last three years working this way in SAP Fiori and Mendix. There are both good things and bad things about it, but I like these cloud IDEs, for the most part.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:54PM (2 children)
Being just a common Joe, let's assume I'm ignorant. (Which is actually pretty accurate.) Can you elaborate, please? What are some of the pluses and minuses you found?
(Score: 2) by arslan on Friday November 08 2019, @05:56AM
I've used cloud dev. env. before, not the microsoft one, but some key pros:
- Everyone has the exact same environment, down to the minor versions of the dev kits, tooling, etc.: No more "but this works on my machine.." bullshit
- New joiners get going immediately, or when you upgrade your physical machine instant productivity
- updates to toolchain is simple as, and everyone gets it immediately
- Physical machine crashes have no impact whatsoever; i.e. uncommitted local changes
- I can hope on different machine, i.e. at home, and continue exactly where I left of: no need to lug my work laptop into public transport zoo
- This is specific to me but likely quite common: We have to use windows at work, but all our apps are deployed on *nix boxes, so dev-ing on windows box is tricky. With the cloud dev, it is on linux, so we get isomorphic dev and deployed env.
- The particular cloud dev env. we used allow us to also share live coding with team mates, quite useful, but I suppose no different than a screen share: however it is cordoned to the dev. env. A screen share will show my email/IM pop-ups..
To be honest when done right, it is a good option. Microsoft on the other hand...
(Score: 2) by donkeyhotay on Friday November 08 2019, @07:28PM
I would concur with a lot of arslan's points made above.
It's a big plus to have everyone on the same development version, with the same addons, widgets, etc.
In the cloud IDEs I've worked with, collaboration and version control are greatly improved.
The biggest downside is the same as for other cloud-based systems: if the services are broken for some reason, nobody can work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:47PM (2 children)
in a cloud of marijuana smoke.
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:40PM (1 child)
I see, you are coding to high standards. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:45PM
Debug when sober.
Every performance optimization is a grate wait lifted from my shoulders.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @04:12PM
Go and put all the source code to Windows on Visual Studio Online, to put your money where your mouth is on the security and confidentiality of your platform. If nobody is running custom builds of Windows in a year's time, we'll know the service is reasonably secure and safe for our own code (except from you of course!)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by NickM on Thursday November 07 2019, @04:16PM (2 children)
I did 3 month of structural refactoring to fixes some features in a brand new humongous monolith in Intellij Idea using remote⁰ X¹ and it was surprisingly good².
If they implement this web IDE using something like RDP over html5/webgl it could be snappy and useful. And since Visual Studio is a beast to install, I could see myself using this for a one off instead of requesting an instance of MSVS in a VM.
0- The X protocol is awesome, my home
workgamestation run Win10, my work workstation run Arch and it worked seamlessly. I hope Wayland won't become dominant until the network transparency is more seemless than what is currently provided by waypipe, i.e. : waypipe ssh user@theserver the-graphical-command is unacceptable as it's not transparent at all, neither is the suggestion of running weston-terminal via waypipe to fake transparency.1- I prefer to work onsite (probably because I have a commute time of 8 minutes) but an idiopathic disease forced me to experience telework.
2- The responsiveness of the ui was. The joy of coding in a multidimensional spaghetti developed by the lowest local bidder, not so much. Insourcing is almost as bad as outsourcing when you work in a bureaucracy with statues that force every purchase over 100 000$CAD to pass by a procurement department; a department without experience in buying bespoke software....
I a master of typographic, grammatical and miscellaneous errors !
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:16PM
Microsoft's position is a lot better than X forwarding or RDP. Visual Studio Code is able to run the full UI client-side but run all of the build tools and language server in an arbitrary remote location (often WSL or local Docker containers, but could also be a specific stack in Azure, another cloud service, or even on-premises servers). Put it in the browser (because it's an Electron app based on Monaco anyway) and you're good to go.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @03:55AM
Well, Wayland is terrible by design. "See all those great features X has? Wouldn't it be great if they all stopped working?" That's the Wayland philosophy in a nutshell.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by srobert on Thursday November 07 2019, @04:34PM (1 child)
Since "the cloud" became a thing, my experience has been that software does not work as well. As a user it seemed better to me when functionality of the software did not generally depend on a network connection. I'm not really a programmer but my "IDE" is neovim, and I don't want to run it in a browser.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:57PM
Honestly? I think I have the same opinion. I try to keep an open mind about this, but I just keep bumping up against the disadvantages more often than the advantages.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Thursday November 07 2019, @04:40PM
...when I used to complain that my project wasn't written in Perl or Python, so it was annoying that the build manager wanted it to depend on those.
Now you want it to depend on a web browser, the network being up, racks of servers run by a 3rd party scattered all over, and probably Perl, Python, and PHP. Just as I always said, "there's too much P in our system".
As always, I miss the money, but I don't miss the P.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:10PM
Most the big software vendors believe that subscription-type services will be more lucrative than the "buy a version" model and are trying every trick in the e-book to get customers on board. They want to nickle and dime you like the banks where every transaction or change could result in a mini-fee.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:30PM
Microsoft Wants Developers to Start Coding in Microsoft's Cloud
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:52PM
Microsoft aZune!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @06:31PM
Never accept a service if you can do the same thing locally in software.
You just lose control and end up with ongoing costs that you wouldn't have vs running things on your own end, and now you're at the whims of MS.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday November 07 2019, @06:55PM (3 children)
Even at the very absolute best you're assuming service doesn't go down.
I've occasionally lost internet service for a week or more. Not often, but it's happened. This strikes me as a very bad idea even if every good thing you could say about it were to be true. And none of the other bad ones. And I also feel that both of those auxiliary conditions are untrue.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Common Joe on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:59PM (2 children)
In my limited dealings with businesses, they seem to be quite happy paying for the cloud service. They swear it's cheaper in the long run.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Thursday November 07 2019, @08:39PM (1 child)
They also tend to discount unexpected events that only happen occasionally. They're wrong.
Focus on the "next quarter" is short-sighted, and will cause you injury...whether the you is a company or an individual. But people don't assess risks properly, or gambling wouldn't be so popular.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Friday November 08 2019, @03:29AM
You know, I've never directly equated putting everything in the cloud with gambling, but that's actually a very accurate description and one many people in business should understand. Unfortunately, I think the proper comparison will be lost on the majority of people.
I'm forever reading / being told that everything is a risk. "This business investment is a risk." "We know Investing in Microsoft technology is a risk, but we think it's the right thing to do." "It's cheaper to move to the cloud. The risk of our servers going down is less." And yet I look at my managers and silently think "You don't really understand the risks, do you? Does anyone? Can anyone?"
I get that life itself is a gamble. I could go to take a leak and at that moment, an asteroid smashes through the roof and kills me. It's highly unlikely, so I don't worry about it. Where I think the problem comes in is the low-risk, high-impact gambles that everyone is making. And there are a lot of them in IT. We know a giant asteroid is on its way to Earth right now and it will kill most life on Earth. It's not a question of it. It's a question of when. It's the same thing in technology. Use strong passwords; don't put banking information on an insecure device like cell phones; don't save passwords in clear text; fully encrypt hard drives; etc, etc etc.
There are so many large asteroids in IT that we know how to deflect, but I think it's really hard for managers to fully understand the costs and risks. Hell, I don't think any single person on Soylent News can deflect every big asteroid. It's especially tough when advertising is geared in such a way as to influence its target audience to invest in an asteroid. They make it sound like a good thing. "Invest in this asteroid so you can dodge three others." o_O That isn't logic. That's lunacy.
And it's why we have the currently political climate we do. "Vote For for Asteroid Idiot because Asteroid Imbecile will devastate Earth!" Again... o_O
Ok. I'll get off my soap box and go stare through my telescope. If I'm going to watch an asteroid impact us, I at least want popcorn and a way to view the whole disaster.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:51PM (5 children)
Clearly the Free Software community must respond. Quick, implement Emacs on the browser!
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday November 07 2019, @08:48PM
Implement emacs on the browser that runs on emacs, surely?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Thursday November 07 2019, @10:03PM (2 children)
True CL users: "what is a browser?"
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 07 2019, @10:34PM (1 child)
A fancy version of wget | less ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @11:14PM
https://lynx.browser.org/ [browser.org]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday November 08 2019, @03:53AM
Emacs is written in a Lisp dialect. Scheme can now be compiled to run on the browser. Except for deficiencies in emacs lisp, running emacs in the browser isn't all that far-fetched.