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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday November 07 2019, @02:03PM   Printer-friendly
from the have-they-applied-for-a-patent-yet? dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:09PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:09PM (#917384)

    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.

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