Friday, February 15, 2013

Visual Studio in the Cloud?

In my last post, I mentioned the wonderful new service from Microsoft that is Team Foundation Service and as I've been busy migrating source code from my local machine to my account and learning the intricacies of Git for Windows I started pondering the idea of development IN THE CLOUD.


With the proliferation of high-powered tablets and smartphones folks are speaking of the Post-PC era but, let's face it, these devices are EXCELLENT for consumption and abysmal for production and, thus, contrary to popular beliefs, PCs aren't going anywhere. This could all, change, though, with the migration of development environments to the Cloud.

Imagine, for a moment, a world where we fire up our favorite Web browsers from any device and head to devenv.visualstudio.com (or devenv.eclipse.org or etc.), sign in, and are presented with our favorite environment with our favorite tools, extensions and options!

So you're on a beach with an iPad and you need to fix a line of code? No problem! Need to do some serious work from your Asus Transformer? Grab the keyboard dock and have at it! How wonderful would this be? And, I don't think we're that far off from this type of thing. Especially with the Microsoft stack, there's clearly a push in this direction already. Office has online (albeit scaled-down) apps now. There's Windows Azure and SQL Azure to host apps and data in the Cloud. And, of course, we have the aforementioned source control, project management and build services of TFS in the Cloud. The ONLY thing missing is a front end for the development environment.

So, my question to you is when? When will we see Visual Studio in the Cloud? Personally, I'm hoping it's sooner, rather than later.

No comments: