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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?
(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.