
Visual Studio Online Supports Cross-Platform Development - dstaheli
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2015/06/05/visual-studio-online-supports-true-cross_2d00_platform-development-_2200_team-explorer-everywhere_2200_-tee-jenkins-git-xcode-mac-tfs-vso-_2200_visual-studio-online_2200_.aspx
======
baldfat
> Microsoft provided me both a PC laptop and a MacBook for my job and hired me
> to coordinate the effort to enable and better support non-traditional
> Microsoft developers (i.e. developers that use something other than C# and
> .NET technologies) to easily design, build, test and deploy their software
> and systems solutions, especially to the cloud.

This is a major change in terms of what I would hear from a Microsoft Blog
Post on Software Development Tools and especially Visual Studio.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Not only that... But i am a C# developer and now i can use tools like bower
and gulp ( already knew them fyi). I seriously love this..

I am afraid though that a lot of current .Net developers won't like this (
colleagues and because vNext is more command line based )

------
josteink
The fact that I'm now complaining about how FreeBSD is poorly supported
compared to other Unixes like Linux and OSX really is quite amazing.

5 years ago I wouldn't even be surprised if MS websites intentionally didn't
work in browsers not IE. Now this.

~~~
x5n1
Microsoft realizes that they don't have a monopoly on this stuff and many
other tools are just as good and as useful as theirs. So they had to actually
innovate. That being said I would still not use Microsoft as getting Windows
is a headache compared to getting OS X. I recently wanted to deploy my QT App
on Windows and found out my old Vista box will not suffice for MVC2013, I need
Windows 7. My Mac from 2009 is still good it can get 10.10, but the Vista box
from the same time is SOL when it comes to compiling Chromium. When Windows is
as free as OS X and Linux, then I might considering developing on their
platform.

~~~
itaysk
1\. Vista is from early 2007. Windows 7 is from 2009. So if you compare you'r
2009 mac to a windows machine, it should be to a Windows 7. 2\. If by free you
mean as in 0 price (if you mean as in liberty then WTF), then your wish just
came true: Windows 10 will be a free upgrade, and it's a major release.

I agree the past few years was a mess for MS, but things are changing and so
should the public opinion.

~~~
x5n1
Well the Mac Mini is the same age as the laptop in question. Early 2009.
Windows 7 was released mid-2009.

~~~
stephengillie
Having gone thru a nightmare trying to upgrade a Mac Mini to Mavericks -
obscure error messages, things that "just don't work", and search results
leading to forum posts that said "The problem went away when I took out the
PNY RAM and put back in the Apple OEM RAM", I'm a little more hostile toward
Apple products than I am to the "Wintel" environment.

*In the end we wound up buying a new Mac Mini. We needed Mavericks for website testing.

~~~
BigChiefSmokem
I've always had issues (and pleasantness) using any OS whether it was Macs,
Windows, iOS, or Android. I don't really believe that one operating system is
better than another in a general sense. At this point they are all way better
than what we had even just 5 years ago.

------
ohitsdom
Love the new Microsoft. For small side projects/prototypes, I have tended to
not use version control (I know, the horror). I just stumbled across their
free private repo storage this morning, and it's going to be a huge
improvement in my at-home workflow.

~~~
integraton
[https://bitbucket.org/](https://bitbucket.org/) and
[https://about.gitlab.com/](https://about.gitlab.com/) have free unlimited
private repositories. Both are excellent.

~~~
amyjess
It's also a pretty good use for a VPS, too. I mostly just use local version
control for my stuff, but I enjoy being able to just push to the Mercurial
repo on my Linode whenever I want to back stuff up.

~~~
lelandbatey
Indeed, plus it's fun to learn how to set up access controls a-la Github and
Bitbucket for your own repositories. So you can do 'git clone
git@yourwebsite.tld:project_name' as well as your own unlimited private repos!

------
robertodelori
It's absolutelly amazing to see, how MS is evolving. Few more steps like that
and I really might consider switching back to Windows and giving WinPhone a
try...

~~~
skrowl
What exactly can you do from your (presumably since it's HN) Mac that you
can't do from Windows that's preventing you from switching now?

~~~
eropple
Not the OP, but for me: _use Unix_. Cygwin is not a sufficient alternative to
having an actual, working Unix that works as I expect it to when I use it,
with a decent terminal emulator on top of it. (PowerShell is both non-
substitutable and inferior.)

Windows-the-desktop is fine, though I don't like it. Windows-the-workstation
is, even with the plus that is Visual Studio, still a considerable distance
behind even Linux, to say nothing of OS X.

~~~
maccard
What's wrong with powershell?why can't you substitute it, and why is it
inferior?

~~~
eropple
As for inferior, for what's wrong with it--well, let's start with the easy
stuff. The language is not designed to be exploratory and is really hard to
write off-the-cuff even when you know it cold. It inherits from .NET in ways
that make it actively difficult to type on a REPL (as that's all a shell _is_
). I like .NET, but the BCL is not the right tool for the job and none of the
tooling built around PowerShell can compensate for just not being easily
written out when I'm exploring a problem by hand. I know PowerShell probably
better than most people who use it every day--I'm not an expert but I've
studied it at length and used it on the regular for nontrivial tasks--and I
can't _think_ in it on the fly. It's a worse solution to a solved problem, for
my money, and I'm fairly convinced it was _designed_ to be an RPC layer for
GUI apps rather than a way for a skilled and knowledgeable user to interface
one's brain with the metal with as little trouble as possible. And that's
fine, but that's worse with regards to the things that I care about.

As for substitutability: this should be obvious. I can't substitute it because
it isn't interoperable with literally everything else in the stack. It is
Microsoft for Microsoft's sake and incompatible with the rest of the non-
Microsoft universe in ways that, it must be noted, Apple _did not do_ ; while
they have proprietary tools in their environments I can still use it with the
bog-standard tools that exist on every other Unix machine I ever touch.

~~~
UK-AL
You've given no actual information to why it's inferior, other the fact it's
not "exploratory". I don't know what that means.

But personally I find working out command names in powershell much more sane,
because of the Verb-Noun pair naming convention.

~~~
eropple
It's not about the commands. Names, whatever. I learned GNU and BSD command
sets cold, names and obscura are not a problem. It's about the experience of
using the thing. Everything is so insanely verbose, except when line-noise
symbols are injected to break up the monotony, and the editing environment for
actually using it is absolute garbage compared to either bash or zsh's
emacs/vim modes. You are stuck writing long, complex (not complicated, but
complex) commands that can't be easily factored down, with an interface that
isn't doing much to help you (and isn't good at the little things besides, ISE
is unacceptable compared to a decent terminal emulator like iTerm2). And so
iterating-- _exploring your problem space_ is unreasonably difficult compared
to everybody else in the same space.

A shell is a REPL. If your language makes actually writing things in that REPL
hard, it is definitionally bad at Shell Stuff. I find it significantly easier
to write code in C# and then transliterate it to PowerShell than to actually
write PowerShell. That's a disastrously bad situation _for a shell_.

~~~
useerup
You were called upon to give some examples. Yet all you offer is more
hyperbole. One is beginning to suspect that despite your assertion that you
"know" Powershell better than most who use it daily, you are actually just a
troll.

Yes, I am calling you out. I am challenging you to provide concrete examples
where Powershell has less discoverability than bash or zsh. I am challenging
you to explain why ISE - an environment designed specifically to combine REPL
with script authoring - is "unacceptable".

And please, no more hyperbole or condescending remarks.

------
baldfat
Free Unlimited Private Git Repos hosted by MicroSoft (Looks like BitBucket has
a new competitor) this is really surprising.

~~~
beagle3
Microsoft's free unlimited chat and phone calls (skype) gets scanned for ads,
and links followed[0]. Probably also stored and forwarded to the NSA.

Don't put anything in there that you really care about, without using
something like git-crypt.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5704574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5704574)

~~~
nivla
You do realize that the scanning is meant for checking the links for malware,
redirection and metadata for previews. Which popular chat service doesn't do
this? Paste a link into Facebook, Google+, Gchat and all are likely to do the
same or the least passively scan it against a list of known malwares.

You are more likely to leak information by just using your browser. Remember
chrome does sent full URLs of your downloads/malware sites when detected back
to its HQ. [1] or post a comment on Slashdot and get your entire computer port
scanned for free. [2]

I thought it was common sense by now that if you have something sensitive to
share do NOT use a cloud based chat or repository!

[1] Information regarding a potentially harmful site or executable file
download (including the full URL of the site or executable file download) may
be sent to Google to help determine whether the site or download is harmful. -
[https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/](https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/privacy/)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7562074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7562074)

~~~
beagle3
> You do realize that the scanning is meant for checking the links for
> malware, redirection and metadata for previews. Which popular chat service
> doesn't do this? Paste a link into Facebook, Google+, Gchat and all are
> likely to do the same or the least passively scan it against a list of known
> malwares.

The first time I noticed Microsoft was doing it, was not long after the skype
purchase and moving to a centralized comm model; gchat for sure was not at the
time, and decentralized skype wasn't either. Furthermore, following that chat,
Bing started scanning a server that was not linked from anywhere on the
internet. I find the correlation more than suspicious.

Anecdotal, but skype ads on a friend's computer tend to reflect chat subjects
- which is NOT just "malware protection". I wouldn't know - I only use it with
an iPhone 4 and its old adless client when I do.

> I thought it was common sense by now that if you have something sensitive to
> share do NOT use a cloud based chat or repository!

I thought it would be too. But I keep meeting people who have the general idea
that "well, all my email is already on gmail/the cloud, and it's working ok -
so I guess all cloud services are trustworthy". And it seems for this kind of
people, until their own gmail gets hacked, nothing gets the message through -
and sometimes even if their own gmail gets hacked.

I was a consultant for one (rather successful) company who keeps all their
precious data on AWS (a few TB of it), without even a local copy, and I
couldn't convince them that yes, even though Amazon probably has better IT and
security than they do, it's still a SPOF, and if anyone (e.g. hacker) changed
their data-at-rest, they would be none the wiser.

Common sense is not all that common.

------
elevensies
Sort of off topic, but it's Friday afternoon so maybe someone has an opinion.
Do people who got burned by Microsoft think its different this time? I see a
warm embrace of a variety of non Microsofty things, so naturally I'm worried
about what comes after (Embrace Extend Extinguish).

~~~
bobajeff
I've been hearing about this'new microsoft' for the better part of a decade
(yep, even when Balmer was still around). So every time somebody mentions it
my mind muddles anything else they have to say.

I'll believe Microsoft has turned a new leaf once they've open sourced their
Operating System's Kernel and their Browser Engine and stopped development on
DirectX or handed it over to Khronos or ISO/IEC and/or open source it.

~~~
spdionis
And give away all their money to the poor...

~~~
bobajeff
Hey, I never said they'd do it. As fanciful as that all is it's no more
fanciful than the so called 'new Microsoft' some people are dreaming up.

------
baldfat
Open Standards for APIs

> We make it easy to integrate your custom tool or third-party service with
> Visual Studio Online using open standards like REST APIs and OAuth 2.0.

------
alexmuro
Stuff like this makes me wonder what % of devs use IDE's vs text editors.
Personally I can't see myself going over to an IDE, and I would have thought
that most 'non traditional microsoft developers' wouldn't consider it either
but maybe I am way off base.

~~~
Maultasche
I've done development both with and without an IDE and I find debugging vastly
easier with an IDE. How do developers who don't use IDEs do debugging other
than with print to console statements? Do they all use tools like gdb and
lldb?

I've pondered learning how to use a tool like gdb or lldb and then using
SublimeText for editing the code, but it looks like a lot more work than just
clicking to set a breakpoint in an IDE. I'm curious to hear what non-IDE
developers are using for debugging.

~~~
Crusoe123
Of course there are debuggers outside of the IDE world. For instance in Ruby
we usually use a debugger as a library (gem) and we call it as a method call
wherever you would put the breakpoint in your IDE.

Typing in a method call on the line where you want to debug isn't much of a
leap from clicking a breakpoint.

I am sure the situation is similar in other languages.

~~~
itsananderson
The big difference I'd point out is that breakpoints can be added and removed
at runtime. Sounds like what you're describing is a situation where you have
to modify your source code to add a breakpoint (similar to a "debugger"
statement in JavaScript or C#). To me, the big value of an IDE is that it lets
you set/unset breakpoints, step, inspect arbitrary data, and modify
application state, all at runtime. Now, I still typically work in VIM and pop
open an IDE/debugger only when I hit a hairy problem, but I still find them
really useful in those cases.

------
sudioStudio64
Its a shame that every Microsoft post goes the same way.

~~~
tkubacki
MS is (again) new cool kid. Rainbows and unicorns.

------
morpheous
If Microsoft continues like this - I'll have no choice but to start liking
them and doing more dev on their platform ;)

Somehow though, I can't seem to silence the inner voice in my head that keeps
asking: "Can a Leopard really change it's spots"?

It'll take a few more iterations of MS's displays of commitment to "Openness"
to get me to believe that they have fully embraced the concept.

I won't be holding my breath ...

------
Roboprog
OK, so after wading through all the marketing fluffery, it sounds like MS is
coming to the table with source control hosting, and calling it Visual Studio
(Online)??? (I sort of expected some kind of web based editing, or maybe even
remote debugging, based on the name).

And, judging from the comments, its greatest strength is when it emulates git,
ignoring their previous 2 source control products?

------
vermooten
We used this when it was called something like tfsonline my god it was shit.
18 months later have they fixed it?

~~~
darklajid
TFS's version control system is - in my personal opinion - broken. TFS hosting
git repositories? Works fine. I mean .. The git part works fine.

So, it depends. If you just care about a place to put your code, I'd say
that's quite decent. If you want issue tracking I'd say 'you can have that'.
What was shit/terrible in the past?

(My experience is based on a TFS setup on-premise, latest version/patches. VSO
is usually ahead and better)

~~~
apalmer
frame of reference: .Net Developer for the last 12 years, been a lead
developer for 3 years, have been the build guy at a couple different places,
and set up TFS for a couple different companies...

The thing about Visual Studio Online is frankly...

Really TFS isnt better than anything comparable for project management related
stuff, meaning: scrums, work items, bug tracking, release planning/scheduling,
kanban boards, burndown charts... Its just not that good.

TFS isnt really strong in source control either, for really super big
enterprise stuff perforce vault etc are generally preferred, for large scale
collaboration projects decentralized as in git is where its at, and small
scale or 'slow to change' either git or svn is a better fit...

TFS is a deployment nightmare, and migrating between versions is a terrible
time consuming experience...

Really TFS at this point's only real strength is good Visual Studio
integration...

So a TFS client that's not in Visual Studio..... just isnt really competitive
with 'average' tools, not even considerable against 'best of breed' tools

~~~
DubiousPusher
Exactly. My current team uses TFS for source control, ci builds, tests, work
item tracking and reports.

When I first joined, I couldn't believe what a cumbersome mess it was but as
I've had to work on some of the infrastructure from time to time I am really
impressed how it all fits together and how much can be surfaced right inside
Visual Studio. (A separate team maintains our actual instance, thank god.)

The true pain as a developer comes from the poorly thought out UI which makes
every little task click heavy. To make things worse, the UI is poorly threaded
and seems to prefetch nothing. This means that drilling down into any area,
especially the source control view leaves you waiting 1-3 seconds per item you
expand.

There's also some weird usability holes, like why after 5+ years is undo
unchanged a command still only found in the optional power tools utility?

~~~
darklajid
Right, the UI seems like you're doing work in access and every click opens
another tab. Some features are 'nice' (link to workitems etc.), but you have
dialogs with tabs with tabcontrols with gazillion other controls and .. yeah.
You don't want to use that, basically.

