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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: 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.