
A rich new JavaScript code editor spreading to several Microsoft web sites - DevKoala
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ARichNewJavaScriptCodeEditorSpreadingToSeveralMicrosoftWebSites.aspx
======
noonespecial
Every once in a while Microsoft still does something exactly right. And it
makes me wistfully sad for all of the missed opportunities.

Yes, I was one of those who did an all-nighter outside a store waiting for
win95.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Re: 95, turns out it was easy to just get on to the beta list. Reminds me of a
funny story...

Summer of '95, I was sitting at the weekly roundtable meeting of our IT
department (at an R&D lab I used to work), and explaining to the boss that I
could get my hands on a new beta of it from a friend so we could kick the
tires. The whole team seemed interested and leaned in. "So," the boss says,
"Who is your friend... he must be some VIP at a big operation, eh?"

"Nope," shaking my head.

"Well, who?" asks the boss.

"He's a high-school student."

"BWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAahahah...."

~~~
DannyBee
Apparently I was not the only high school student on the 95 beta.

I wonder now if i was the only one to crash our entire novell network by
trying to use Microsoft's version of the novell client.

~~~
mistermann
I used to crash a Novell network by doing design changes on MS Access tables
with lots of rows.

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boromi
I really enjoy typing with this text editor. It feels just right: nice
colorscheme, nice cursor width, nice bracket matching and code highlighting. I
hope MS makes a native windows 8 app using the code editor or give it under a
free licence it so that other can make the app.

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AceJohnny2
Have they announced this anywhere? If not, when are they firing their
marketing department?

~~~
RyanZAG
Suprisingly enough, this really is the release announcement. This is their
marketing department.

 _Scott Hanselman ... Microsoft employee._

It's Microsoft's new marketing strategy - they try to promote 'organic growth
and acceptance' of new products through social media and viral advertising. I
don't believe it works very well - it always comes across as a bit false and
pollutes the real comment environment, giving viewers the strange feeling that
something is wrong. It also creates a lot of antagonism when paid employees
actually argue with detractors, etc.

~~~
shanselman
Respectfully, that's nonsense. I don't even work in their department. I've
been online for 20+ years, blogging for like 12 years and I've worked at MS
for 6.

The blog is a blog. This post is just a post. I get in trouble for blogging a
few times a year, and that suits me just fine. It's just a job.

~~~
taspeotis
OT, but do you think you could point me in the direction of whoever's
responsible for WPL/AntiXSS? It's been broken for ages [1] [2]. There seem to
be no reliable HTML sanitization library for .NET right now. It looks like the
best I could do is to copy and paste a bunch of code and hope that it works
[3].

[1]
[http://wpl.codeplex.com/releases/view/80289#ReviewsAnchor](http://wpl.codeplex.com/releases/view/80289#ReviewsAnchor)

[2]
[http://wpl.codeplex.com/workitem/17246](http://wpl.codeplex.com/workitem/17246)

[3] [http://eksith.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/whitelist-santize-
htm...](http://eksith.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/whitelist-santize-
htmlagilitypack/)

~~~
shanselman
Let me ask around. It's handled by a group that isn't ASP.NET.

~~~
taspeotis
Any effort is appreciated. Thank you.

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michaelwww
I just installed SkyDrive to try it out. I already had an account for my VS
Express 2012 so in under 30 seconds I was editing a file and trying the code
completion. It looks good and works well, so it's a nice offering from the
Microsoft coders. (Gee, I sound like a marketing shill but I'm not, I just
happen to love TypeScript and Visual Studio, although TS failed me in a
surprising way today - but this isn't the post for that.)

------
malandrew
How does it compare to Ace and CodeMirror?

[0] [http://ace.c9.io](http://ace.c9.io)

[1] [http://codemirror.net](http://codemirror.net)

~~~
marijn
That's hard to say until they actually release documentation. When I first
noticed it [1] 10 months ago, it seemed very flaky and slow, but it appears to
have improved a lot in the meantime.

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/marijnjh/status/252814288891285505](https://twitter.com/marijnjh/status/252814288891285505)

Still, it's closed source, so for now, not very relevant for the rest of us.

~~~
malandrew
So, no tern.js for them until it's open source :)

I'd love to know their motivation for writing their own instead of
contributing to Ace or CodeMirror.

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acchow
Amazing.

Has anyone used this? Does it reference symbols across files? I imagine it
would be rather expensive to actually have a compiler front-end running live
in the cloud across my project.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
What exactly is "amazing" about it?

This is the sort of functionality that has been made available by numerous
text editors and IDEs for numerous programming languages for many, many years
now.

It's somewhat unusual to see how so many in the JavaScript and web development
communities can get so excited about catching up to where basically everybody
else was decades ago. It'd be one thing if JavaScript and web development were
new creations, but they're not.

While this may be useful in some cases, it's surely not "amazing".

~~~
acchow
Did you also look at Google Docs when it first came out and remark that gamers
have been playing together online in the same arena for years?

IntelliJ is my IDE. I'm excited about this because it's in a web application,
not because I've never seen code completion before.

~~~
msutherl
I looked at Google Docs when it first came out and it reminded me of something
I saw in 1968.

~~~
acchow
I'm intrigued. Can you describe this 1968 product? What was it called?

~~~
nsp
I'm pretty sure he's referring to 'The mother of all demos' by Ebgelbart,
where he demonstrated live collaborative document editing among dozens of
ludicrously ahead of its time software features. [1]

That said, I disagree with the larger point the op is making. When you work in
a technical field you tend to figure out the tool for a task, grin and near
through a finicky setup process and then dismissing improvements that reduce
that friction as trivial/unimportant, even though those improvements mean its
able to solve the problem for an exponentially larger market.

A classic example is rsync and dropbox. It's less pronounced here, but the
more advanced web code editors get, the longer someone interested in the topic
can mess around and try things out without setting up a local dev environment
(multiple hours of totally unfun work if you're a novice), the more likely
they are to stay interested and push through and get over that hump when the
time comes.

[1]The video(100% worth watching) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-
zdhzMY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY) Wikipedia:
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

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tommyd
Looks like the (very impressive) editor on their Try F# site (which serves as
a great introduction to the language, providing you with a scratchpad/REPL and
output window for in browser coding):
[http://www.tryfsharp.org/](http://www.tryfsharp.org/)

~~~
ktt
Yep, that's the same editor (Monaco). This can be easily verified by checking
the HTML.

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Guillaume86
Related discussion on codeplex (typescript specific):
[http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/401549](http://typescript.codeplex.com/discussions/401549)

And a ACE/typescript integration with code validation and autocomplete:
[http://guillaume86.github.io/ace/kitchen-
sink.html](http://guillaume86.github.io/ace/kitchen-sink.html) (switch to
typescript mode in the left panel).

------
relaxitup
There's also this one based on node.js and Ace... There is a github and you
can install on your own server.. I'm using it as a private interactive
pastebin/code snippet editor etc on a vps of mine.. Just need to put an apache
ssl reverse proxy with basic auth in front of it and I'll be good to go..

[http://codeintune.com/](http://codeintune.com/)

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pingec
Tried the editor at
[http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/](http://www.typescriptlang.org/Playground/)
and there is one very annoying thing. I cannot type the closing curly brace
("}") on a non-us keyboard layout (Alt Gr+ N). Other than that, it's good.

~~~
ryanmolden
I talked with someone internally that works on this, he said:

I can type { and } on a Swiss keyboard which is a AltGr + ä and AltGr + $.

What keyboard layout were you seeing issues with? Looking at Wikipedia it
looks like it would be South Slavic Latin based on your mention of Alt Gr+N?

You can mail me privately if you wish (mail in profile).

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kaiwetzel
The inline threaded comments look like an awesome feature, would be amazing to
have an inline widget like that in Code Mirror. Submitting tiny local patches
this way might be useful, too :D

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itsbits
Editing is good and fine..but can i preview my changes directly??

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relaxitup
The code editor does not appear to work at all for me with IE 8.

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meapix
doesn't have vi mode

~~~
no_gravity
Any good online editors with vi mode out there?

~~~
nilved
There needs to be a good online editor before there can be a good online
editor with vi mode.

~~~
meapix
right

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flagnog
As Admiral Ackbar would say: "It's a trap!"

Unless you're committed to MS anyway.

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pedromorgan
Great.. How even more script kiddies can practice...

~~~
recursive
Are you opposed to practicing?

