I'm not sure if you saw, but you can keep it and do the same things as well in the future.
"Microsoft says the language services it built for Visual Studio Code will be available in other editors as well, including Sublime Text, Vi and Atom."
> "Microsoft says the language services it built for Visual Studio Code will be available in other editors as well, including Sublime Text, Vi and Atom."
I just heard about OmniSharp the other day and had some trouble getting it to properly work. But now that this has been announced I may just switch to that.
I still love Sublime and will use that for all other non-.NET/C# purposes.
Haha I had a similar first thought. I hope its as extensible as some of the competition, I'm sure it won't come ready out of the box for some things I find fun.
This was posted 10 minutes ago and you commented 5 minutes ago. Given I tried to download it and it failed with some weird error message on their site (not to mention registration walls suck) the logical conclusion is that you are not serious about your comment. That then begs the question why you would post such a comment. Looking at your submission history, one could easily assume you work for Microsoft.
If that is the case, I would suggest you guys grow a brain and remove the registration wall. It's 2015.
Their comment wasn't based on using it but simply based on "Visual Studio on something other than Windows" more than likely.
Registration walls are only a bad idea when you care that a product reaches as far as possible. Given "Visual Studio on OSX/Linux" is going to drive humongous amounts of interest the extra metadata they get from the registration wall is worth annoying a few people.
On a side note several people have said that it is likely not available yet.
My first thought at seeing this announcement was also that I would be uninstalling Sublime on my Mac. I'm not a Microsoft employee. And give MS time, they just announced it, available "later today". No need to assume a lack of brains.
I'm a pretty heavy user of IntelliJ but would never ever uninstall or not use Sublime Text, its like comparing apples to oranges. Any decent developer would know when to use either to be more productive.
"(if this link isn’t live yet, give it a few more minutes and then try again)."
It's literally right after the link. What did you expect? It's a breaking story, the product was just announced and in the conference it was announced as available later today.
Personally I'd expect a "not live" link to fail to load, or be 404, or put up a "coming soon" page, or something. If I get a login page that indicates "live" to me.
It is a bit strange that Microsoft keeps wanting me to log in for things like this. I'm not sure.
If any Microsoft engineers happen to be scanning this thread, it correctly redirected me to our organizations login page for me to use my standard credentials, but failed after with a generic Bad Request error.
More than a year ago I skipped the page that asked me to enable the two-factor authentication, as I didn't want to give Microsoft my phone number. One day I found myself completely locked out of my account. Long story short, I've never been able to access my email account again, since that day. The instructions to unblock the account [1], say, I shit you not:
If I try to enter my number, I get an unspecified error and I'm still locked out. Obviously. But not to worry, the page says:
>"If you can’t unblock your account with the security code and changing your password, customer support can still help you get your account back. To contact customer support, you’ll need to sign in to your account, and fill out an online form."
...
I really don't know what kind of brain-dead monkeys they put in charge of these things. And while it's hard to believe that a functioning human being could ever come up with such a bullet-proof procedure to unblock an account blocked for "security reasons", what really baffles me is that this has been going on for almost two years. This should give you an idea of how much Microsoft cares about their consumer products.
So, consider yourself lucky to have gone past the login, which, apparently, isn't something to take for granted with Microsoft.
https://account.live.com/resetpassword.aspx doesnt seem to require my password. I was able to select "I know my password, but can't log in" then chose "I don't have any of these" at which point I was given a form to fill out to have a CS rep contact me.
Give it a try, it might give you access to your account again.
It's what I did at the time, and I did it again now, but it doesn't work. I can change password as many times as I want, but the account is still blocked for no reason.
So you didn't get to the big contact form? Did you select the same things I did? I just tried it again on another account, and got the same page as before.
When most companies say free they mean free of charge, if they want to say open source they say open source, because that’s the term the world understands. Basically only the FSF uses free to mean Free Software.
Many companies use "open source" or simply "open" in a way that isn't compatible with the open source definition. This is known as open washing. A good, non-Microsoft example is Epic Games and Unreal Tournament 4. They talk a lot about being "open", but the source code and assets are all proprietary.
Yeah, I know, that’s my point. The distinction is the reason companies don’t like to use confusing terms: “free” has only one meaning for them in the context of software.
> "Free software" and "open source software" are two terms for the same thing: software released under licenses that guarantee a certain, specific set of freedoms.
> “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software” to show we do not mean it is gratis.
Looks like it's just free as in beer for now. Who knows what will happen a few months/years from now when it doesn't have a huge userbase and Microsoft isn't interested in continuing to support it alone.
Yeah, and while I appreciate their efforts... I find their documentation on their Azure clients for node.js too sparse and inconsistent. It can definitely be better, at least now I can look through their codebase to get what I need.
It's free as in beer only. Please do not use it if you care about software freedom, and urge Microsoft to respect you by releasing the source code under a free license.
Not sure why this comment is getting a down vote, this is a very important issue. I understand a lot of startups get money from Microsoft, and a lot more use their products, but that doesn't make this less of an issue.
Down votes for pointing this out? Must be Microsoft employees or partners. Wish HN had a way of filtering votes given the source domain. I have the karma, but the chilling effect on new users could be nontrivial.
Visual Studio Code is already built on top of a number of open source projects we've created or are contributing to, including the Roslyn compiler and language tools, OmniSharp, Typescript, and GitHub Electron. We are still in an early stage and we're evolving our architecture - and we'll look at what we open source, and how we do it, as part of that.
AADSTS50020: User account 'me@captnemo.in' from external identity provider 'live.com' is not supported for application 'caf83767-0da8-454f-ae8d-77f63deaf359'. The account needs to be added as an external user in the tenant. Please sign out and sign in again with an Azure Active Directory user account.
I'm guessing only proper microsoft accounts are allowed? (@outlook.com, @live.com etc). I understand it might not be live yet, but I don't get the "unavailable yet" error.
tldr; light weight Visual Studio for OSX/Windows/Linux with support for dozens of languages, intellisense (autocomplete), refactoring, debugging (yes, real debugging), git integration and it is free
As a developer I will mind if it's not fast though, or if it does not behave like other native apps. The fact that it uses more memory is not a fact that stands alone either. The reason it uses more memory is because it has to do more. Because it has to do more, it's always going to be slower.
So far on Fedora 21, VSCode is a slow and buggy experience. Atom was never as good as any of the native dev tools that I've used IMO. As a matter of fact, I can't think of one application developed with web tech that performs as well as it's native counterpart.
Cross platform IDEs for C++ like Qt Creator and JetBrains Clion already made huge progress over the past years.
There's a good chance that we'll see the emergence of a high quality reusable open source C++ language service component for editors over the next three years or so. Google in particular seems to be putting a lot effort into Clang, LLDB, Kythe and other developer tools. Facebook is also working on a web-based IDE and presumably has interest in good C++ support. Modules in C++17 (which Microsoft intends to adopt quickly) will probably make things easier.
If you haven't already, check out srclib, an open-source cross-language cross-editor code analysis library designed to support things like editor plugins: https://srclib.org/. I'm one of the creators and would love to hear your thoughts.
It'll be interesting to see what the performance is like, since this has been a recurring problem with web-tech based applications (especially editors like Atom and Brackets).
Actually seems to work better than Atom or Brackets so far... I found both to be intolerable pretty quickly... this, I'll be continuing with for a couple days, I like the UI better than sublimetext so far.
I don't really understand the sentiment that you have expressed in your aside. If they deliver an interesting and/or useful product, why not reward them with credit?
removed it... I just don't like when I sound like a company shill. In this case imho the editor itself actually runs than my trials with brackets and atom... The startup time is actually tolerable, and the editing seems to work a little better too. A few days will determine if I go back to sublime again.
The Visual Studio Code shell is built on GitHub's Electron Shell, but the editor is a new and improved version of our own Monaco editor, which we use on Azure Websites, Visual Studio Online, and a number of other web sites, and in the F12 Tools in Internet Explorer.
Cross platform .Net doesn't include a cross platform UI environment... though cross-platform WPF would be pretty awesome (not sure how much effort to extend on their efforts for silverlight would go).
Wow. I seriously don't know what to think anymore. What is their end game? Which platform are they hoping to become / remain dominant in?
Don't get me wrong---I'm as happy as the next guy about this. VS is the only tolerable language-dedicated IDE, if they take 25% of their VS engineering mantra to this it will be better than almost anything else.
But where does it end? I am clearly so not in touch with my inner mba. I just cannot even think of how what they are planning in the long run, here.
What's going on? Have they lost their minds? Is there a secret master plan? How realistic could that be? Is this the red giant to their eventual white dwarf?
Actually it is... it's not too different from what it always was. In the past, it was about businesses running "Back Office" versions of servers in the office. Because NAS boxes are now a good enough option in small businesses, and many are moving their hosting into more prominent cloud services, they are positioning Azure to be the platform of choice for windows based services and applications. They've got Office365 to handle the mail server duties people lost moving away from back office. As a small business you no longer need to self-host anything (other than maybe a local NAS box).
I hate sounding like an advertisement for MS, but it really isn't THAT much of a pivot. More adapting to keep those parts of income that used to come from server licenses now as services. Not even mentioning Azure as a target, which is probably the best bet for keeping legacy apps running while transitioning/refactor/rewrite to new generations.
My hypothesis is that winning over developers to use their platform will eventually result in more Azure users. I get the feeling Azure will be their one of their next cash cows, and this is one of the steps in enabling that.
Azure users and native app developers on the Windows Store.
With the free W10 upgrades for 7/8 users and a 30% cut of Windows Store sales, they stand to make some money. But they have to get developers back on their side first, otherwise the store stays dominated by garbage.
But aren't Store apps essentially built on the Win32 API? I remember an article basically saying '.NET didn't win' for that development. I could be recalling wrong, and I'm sure there are wrappers and such, but still...
The current crop of store apps are in a more limited API. But as of today, MS is also going to be selling traditional Win32 apps shipped in a sandbox that allows for clean install/uninstall. Demo showed Photoshop Elements.
They're also supporting Objective-C now, with VS slupring up Xcode projects. Did not expect that one.
Most of the WinAPI is abstracted out for Store apps as most will be using either .Net or JavaScript for their applications, with the latter essentially being extended/embedded web applications iirc.
I haven't paid much attention to native apps either desktop or mobile. I've built my career understanding distributed systems/communications flows and web based fromt ends... To me most of that is a better experience than what little attempts I've made at front end platform development.
This is decent strategy if the end game is eco-system around Microsoft technologies, not just windows but their whole offerings including Azure, IoT etc.
What I took from it is that Microsoft used to make all their money from Windows and Office, but now the company is looking to transition towards being a service company rather than a product company. As a service-oriented company, restricting developers towards a single platform doesn't really help them, so ultimately it's in Microsoft's best interest to get .NET out there as much as possible so that people will want to choose their services.
I won't admit to "getting it", but what I gather is that Microsoft want .NET to be a valid choice for everyone.
Getting it is easy. Even with very good support for .Net (C#, F# mostly) in Mono, actually developing, deploying and maintaining an application outside of Windows with VS is problematic by comparison. In the past I wrote a couple of web based applications in .Net that could readily deploy to Linux. Even then, deploying to Windows was so less cumbersome than getting mod-mono working we decided it was worth the cost of Windows Web Server (or whatever the 2003 version was called).
At this point, they want to do this with Azure services. Which is very easy to work against with very rich tools in .Net. They're extending this development ability to other platforms, so that hopefully people will choose to use .Net even if targeting other platforms in the hope that people will choose to deploy to Azure over other cloud providers in much the same way that I chose to deploy to windows a decade ago.
This doesn't even count migrations of existing applications, which may well be better off on Azure (in windows) with new systems under Linux. The past two years, I've spent supporting Windows applications where a next generation was moving to Linux (node/iojs). Right now I'm doing this against Azure.
Being pragmatic, I'm even using Azure Storage (queues, tables and blob) for migration data, which means I don't have to setup/configure/manage a bunch of servers to do these tasks. Setting up RabbitMQ isn't hard, but there's time involved. Setting up C* isn't hard either, but if the data is transitional (using azure tables to hold data exported from the old system, and queues to trigger import into the new), it doesn't make sense to configure my own server. After using these services, I may use them more deeply, I'm already using Azure Tables for my configuration settings even, so I don't have to maintain an etcd/consul cluster.
All of this said... while I am mindful of getting locked in, and do have a strategy for breaking out, and my core application data won't be in azure services... actually using them makes me consider using them more.
From my own experience, what they are doing is a legitimate strategy and far better than how they approached it early on, and may still be. I stopped attending .Net conferences/meetings about 4-5 years ago because they were turning into Azure sales presentations more than development presentations in general. This is also the same time node.js started to become a viable contender, and I started using it for web project client files (js merge/min, less etc).
I think it's apparent that Microsoft has admitted the reality that the operating system just doesn't matter any more - and you're not going to make money there.
So it's all about services, and Azure is one of the sources of those services.
This is what worries me. What if we all start using these tools and then new management comes in (or if it was the plan all along) and poisons the well.
Keep in mind that this time they are not just giving away stuff "free as in beer" they are also giving it away not under AGPL, not under GPL, not under LGPL but under a MIT License which is one of the most permissive licenses out there.
Contrast this to Oracle/Java. Or about any other huge corporation.
Using a permissive license is the strategy that makes the most sense when your primary goal is proliferation over developer community. Thus, it's nothing surprising.
Interestingly, owning the market in developer tools and programming languages is how Microsoft got their start in the 70s/very early 80s. Not only is this strategy a reasonable one (at least to my uneducated outside opinion), it's starting to look exactly like the one they had before MS-DOS (and that eventually worked out OK for them, though it is still much less certain that Azure or something like it can play the role of DOS in this story).
Whatever it is, I'm not sure I've actually been excited about what Microsoft is doing since Windows 2000, and that's starting to change.
Yeah the real test will be, is this thing supported 5 years from now? There's a nice history of projects like Silverlight that get a lot of buzz and love early on but languish and are killed a few years later when management and priorities change.
Management in particular. It's unfortunate that new personnel always feel the need to push their own vision rather than the previous guy's, often just for the sake of it.
Windows is becoming irrelevant, Microsoft Office is being supplanted by Google Docs being both free and 'good enough', and worst of all, Microsoft completely missed the boat on mobile.
The Microsoft of old would have died out eventually. What we are seeing is not something you see often - a behemoth of a company doing a 'pivot'.
What would you do remain relevant in the face of the majority of the internet services not going anywhere near Microsoft for material income?
Pivoting to becoming more service oriented. Azure/Office365 are their next generation core. Azure as a development target, which pragmatically makes sense as companies with Windows services/apps move to the cloud. And Office365 in the same vein. Not to mention them extending office to other platforms, which combined with Office365 (email) makes a lot of sense.
All of that said, outlook integration to office365 is actually worse as a mail client than it had been in the past with self-hosted Exchange. Counts don't update properly when you "delete all" from a folder, and even then it's inconsistent. I know it's to allow for better scale/resource control on the servers but it's still very annoying to say the least.
You're completely lost in your Silicon Valley mindset. Most of the western world still shows up to work and uses Office on Windows. Even in tech, I've seen non-technical workers request PC's just so they can use "real" Office. Office for Mac doesn't cut it. And while it might be good enough for you, it's not for many people who rely on Word, Office, and PowerPoint for work. Oh, and Google Docs is hardly free in the office.
I'm not saying this would happen tomorrow. Microsoft has enough inertia to fire all their developers and just sell the current version of Windows and Office for a long time. Hell, some 30% of computer users in China still use Windows XP.
After a few generations raised on smartphones and tablets without any Microsoft apps, Microsoft Office would just be a curiosity their parents used, like Corel Draw or dBase.
Fortunately Microsoft has taken note; there's rumor of Android Office apps, and the latest version of the Surface tablet is quite popular.
Microsoft, and in particular, Office is still going strong, but the stranglehold it had in the 90's is gone.
--
Google may want businesses to pay, but going to docs.google.com and using your personal email address works just fine - much to the chagrin of IT departments everywhere.
Still he has a point. Kids will toy around with Google Docs but when push comes to shove when they're hired by PWC or Deloitte, Microsoft Office is where it's at.
Google Docs doesn't hold a candle against it while LibreOffice can barely sneeze in front of it.
I am very far from the valley, but we have mostly phased office out in favor of google docs. It turns out that easy sharing is the killer feature and that google docs really is good enough which will obviously differ based on what you do.
What non-technical users request won't matter, they will ask for whatever they are familiar with and complain if any icon is moved just slightly.
Except the home desktop is a dying (or dead) breed - and many people will either have OSX laptops at home, or no traditional computer at all, only phones and tablets... They could choose Office 365 to some extent, but they could just as easily choose gApps.
> The number from a few years ago showed college freshmen using Macs by 70%.
In the US, perhaps. Where I study, I can count the number of people owning MacBooks on my fingers. They're still way too overpriced/lacking in hardware compared to PCs at the same market rates.
> Microsoft Office is being supplanted by Google Docs being both free and 'good enough'
I like Google Docs as much as the next guy or girl, but I find this hard to believe when we had to end a meeting several minutes into it when the Google Doc displayed an http-500-style error when trying to load a spreadsheet.
If you know what you're doing with Office/use the advanced features there is just no comparison. Office is the Emacs of the business world. But I suppose most people could get on well enough with Google Docs.
This is especially true with Excel and Access (and to a limited extent PowerPoint). It's insane how much business logic can (and often does) live inside some random Excel spreadsheet.
Word mail merges are actually a fully featured templating system. On top of the whole thing being scriptable. But I think this is less "discoverable" than Excel.
I actually tried it for about a half hour, and so far like it a lot... I don't know if/what plugins will become available. I do like that the side menu makes it much easier to show/hide the file directory view (which is indispensable imho). Also, the git integration seems very nice, I haven't tried it as I'm editing via a samba share to a nix machine and don't want to screw up the file permissions.
A couple nitpicks...
* There doesn't seem to be a way to set the file encoding... can I assume that files will always be saved in UTF8 w/o BOM?
* There doesn't seem to be a way to set line endings... can I assume that files will always be saved with unix (lf) line endings? By extension, will this fix windows line endings, or mixed to LF line endings?
* It would be really nice if there was an integrated command prompt, similar to cloud9's, that could be shown/hidden. Configurable to use a given shell (in windows, I'd prefer a git-bash prompt).
All in all, really nice work, and this may well replace sublimetext everywhere for me. I don't use any of the more advanced plugins with sublime, and I actually like the VSC editor's UI more. They seem to have burrowed the hotkeys from sublimetext.
It could be as simple as them realizing "hey, that thing we've been doing for the last fifteen years hasn't really been working. So maybe we should try doing the opposite."
It's a good question, and the only answer I have is that when the old binary fortresses crumble you have to do something to stay relevant, and hope business opportunity will be found. I developed almost exclusively on Windows for almost twenty years, and then one day I looked at the cost of a universal MSDN sub and thought: this is getting nuts. So this is a great development, imo, because MS tools rock. I have been working in Ubuntu now for over three years, and in that time I haven't missed very much, but I have missed Visual Studio.
It seems like if MS just doubled down on Windows and Office they'd be in trouble if/when those stopped being so profitable and there are certainly reasons to think they're going to lose ground there (especially with consumer markets, but with business markets too).
It's pretty simple, Visual Studio Code, the .NET Core runtime for Os X/Linux, ASP.NET 5 and TypeSript are only useful to do Web dev. With Azure they provide the best cloud to run those web app. So they don't lose any VS customer that do software dev, not lose much web dev VS customer on windows because the full VS will always be better and they provide tools for every web developer on other platforms in their area of expertise : development with code completion tools. It's a pretty smart strategy I think.
Based on complete guess work - They seem to be moving up the chain by building and selling services on top of existing platforms. e.g. Azure on top of databases, Third party apps on outlook etc. Not sure what they intend to build on top of windows...
Microsoft is a software company , so i would guess their end game is not services or hardware but software. Anyone got any ideas how they plan to dominate the software world and make money out of it? They 've just gained a ton of new fans though, that's for sure.
Cross platform developers tools by Microsoft! Great news! MS has some of the best developer tools out there. In my opinion, the only downside has been the dependency on the Windows platform. As a developer, I feel much more comfortable in a Unix environment.
This move was unthinkable a decade ago. I'm very glad to see MS moving in this direction. Just because of this announcement I want to start playing with TypeScript and C# again.
This move was very thinkable a decade ago. Even two decades. In fact, a good example from 1995:
From Wikipedia: The strategy and phrase "embrace, extend and extinguish", was first introduced in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust trial when the vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, testified[8] that Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz used the phrase in a 1995 meeting with Intel to describe Microsoft's strategy toward Netscape, Java, and the Internet.
Even when Microsoft 'Embraced and Extended' Java, it was only on the Windows platform. It was not cross-platform. The whole point of that methodology wasn't to make sure that everyone was using Microsoft-flavoured Java, but to make sure that everyone was using Microsoft-flavoured Java on the Microsoft Windows platform.
Cross-platform didn't mean much in 1995. Which other platform was there at the time? Apple was dead in the water. Red Hat had just come into existence. Netscape Navigator 1.0 had just shipped in December 1994.
Arguably windows didn't have the hold it does now in 1995... in 1995, DR-DOS/Desqview and other UIs were prominent, and OS/2 was more popular as a desktop than Linux has ever been (as a ratio), not sure about OSX today. That also doesn't count Apple's penetration at the time which really wasn't as insignificant as you make it out to be.
A lot of that changed starting with Windows 95. Though, it's really 1998 that MS practices in terms of embrace/extend/extinguish was at their top.
I finished my school in 1993. None of the computer science teaching was on PC. I have used mainly sun but also HP, next and VAX computers. PC were only used for word and excel.
The school was lending special network card for the few pupils (less than 10 among 400) who had linux on their PC. The common network card (we had network plug in our rooms) was not supported by linux.
Even if linux was not mainstream, Cross-platform had already a meaning at that time and djgpp was well known to run programs on dos (for example caml-light, the ancestor of ocaml).
The fact that Java was device-agnostic due to the JVM is something that Microsoft viewed as a threat. Bill Gates saw Netscape as a threat with their plugin system because of the idea that the OS would just be a shell to the browser which would run programs via plugins. This one of the reasons that they wanted to destroy the Internet. They feared that it would make Windows irrelevant.
"Write once, run everywhere" is a threat to a company whose entire business model is based on "everywhere" being owned by them.
I'm not sure what the reference to Netscape Navigator is supposed to mean, but I find interesting that 2.02 (released in 1996) was available on all these platforms:
> Windows3.1
> Windows95/NT
> Macintosh
> BSD
> Linux
> SunOS
> Solaris
> HP-UX
> OSF/1
> Irix
> AIX
> OS/2
> OpenVMS VAX
> OpenVMS Alpha
That's very much debatable. As a particular counterpoint, Apple hardware had a pretty significant market share among educational deployments. There were quite a few schools that were Mac-only even as late as the early/mid 2000s, let alone in the 90's.
Now granted, a big reason why that changed was because all the homes and businesses used Windows (or some specialized Unix like Solaris or IRIX), so the education market eventually shifted to the Windows world, but that happened quite a bit after the 90's.
Everybody talked about thin clients and Java as an OS at that time, there was a massive Java hype going. The things Microsoft struck preempively against largely never materialized thanks to super-crappy broadband (if it even existed) and lousy early Java performance (there are dozens of Java office suites, browsers etc that never got traction or was canned before release thanks to general unmarketability).
It seems Microsoft has influenced JavaScript/ES v6 with their TypeScript intermediate language lead by Anders Hejlsberg. Given the vast TypeScript code based that MS wrote for SharePoint 365, Visual Studio Online/Code, etc. it seems more than logical. But, read on:
BRENDAN [Eich (JavaScript creator)]: Again, TypeScript is
smart because it’s embracing and extending. Let’s hope
Microsoft doesn’t try to extinguish. That’s the third E.
JAMISON: [Laughs]
BRENDAN: I don’t think they will. I think they actually
bought into JavaScript at some level. And I’ve talked to
people like Anders Hejlsberg about this.
But Brendan Eich answered to my thread by replying to a parent:
ES6 and the Harmony agenda influenced TypeScript. Where
TS went its own way on things like open modules, MS has
promised to track the Ecma standard versions ASAP.
In particular, TS classes were purely an extension to
ES6's design, while ES6 was not frozen. There was not
feedback the other way, at least not phrased in terms of
TS -- the MS folks on TC39 had to make more generalized
arguments for changing the draft ES6 spec.
Maybe after more people know about Visual Studio Code some others share the "German angst" about their common business tactics a bit too. I would prefer if they don't turn JavaScript into C# Trojan horse style. Hopefully things have changed since Satya Nadella took over.
I think i should have used "Excitement" instead. On your point, my enthusiasm grown with the more I learn as I see more potential that I would not have given my previous lack of knowledge.
Resharper probably isn't going to run on here. Resharper has definitely been a requirement in the past, but Jetbrains seems to be slow to embrace Rosylen, which is clearly the future on .NET. It's not at all clear to be how long they're going to remain in their dominant position.
560 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] thread"Microsoft says the language services it built for Visual Studio Code will be available in other editors as well, including Sublime Text, Vi and Atom."
Whoa.
I still love Sublime and will use that for all other non-.NET/C# purposes.
If that is the case, I would suggest you guys grow a brain and remove the registration wall. It's 2015.
Registration walls are only a bad idea when you care that a product reaches as far as possible. Given "Visual Studio on OSX/Linux" is going to drive humongous amounts of interest the extra metadata they get from the registration wall is worth annoying a few people.
On a side note several people have said that it is likely not available yet.
My first thought at seeing this announcement was also that I would be uninstalling Sublime on my Mac. I'm not a Microsoft employee. And give MS time, they just announced it, available "later today". No need to assume a lack of brains.
Come on, MS.
It's literally right after the link. What did you expect? It's a breaking story, the product was just announced and in the conference it was announced as available later today.
FWIW, the response I get is: Sorry, but we're having trouble signing you in. We received a bad request.
(I'm logged in with the same account through other services.)
If any Microsoft engineers happen to be scanning this thread, it correctly redirected me to our organizations login page for me to use my standard credentials, but failed after with a generic Bad Request error.
>"To unblock your account go to https://account.live.com and sign in to your blocked account."
If I try to enter my number, I get an unspecified error and I'm still locked out. Obviously. But not to worry, the page says:
>"If you can’t unblock your account with the security code and changing your password, customer support can still help you get your account back. To contact customer support, you’ll need to sign in to your account, and fill out an online form."
...
I really don't know what kind of brain-dead monkeys they put in charge of these things. And while it's hard to believe that a functioning human being could ever come up with such a bullet-proof procedure to unblock an account blocked for "security reasons", what really baffles me is that this has been going on for almost two years. This should give you an idea of how much Microsoft cares about their consumer products.
So, consider yourself lucky to have gone past the login, which, apparently, isn't something to take for granted with Microsoft.
[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/account-t...
Give it a try, it might give you access to your account again.
Try with https://account.live.com/acsr it's the page it eventually sends me to for the recovery.
http://opensource.org/osd
http://opensource.org/faq#free-software
> "Free software" and "open source software" are two terms for the same thing: software released under licenses that guarantee a certain, specific set of freedoms.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
> “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software” to show we do not mean it is gratis.
I know that doesn't help you when you need to consume the docs, but at the very least they're allowing the community to help out (finally).
So far on Fedora 21, VSCode is a slow and buggy experience. Atom was never as good as any of the native dev tools that I've used IMO. As a matter of fact, I can't think of one application developed with web tech that performs as well as it's native counterpart.
special request for Rust autocompletion, please!
I wonder if this will be open sourced in a way that would allow Visual Studio intellisense in Sublime Text. I want that for C++ so bad.
There's a good chance that we'll see the emergence of a high quality reusable open source C++ language service component for editors over the next three years or so. Google in particular seems to be putting a lot effort into Clang, LLDB, Kythe and other developer tools. Facebook is also working on a web-based IDE and presumably has interest in good C++ support. Modules in C++17 (which Microsoft intends to adopt quickly) will probably make things easier.
Edit: Got my answer. Electron and TypeScript: https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/593454574297427968
EDIT: Apparently at 11AM PDT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9459632 (aka in an hour-ish)
http://electron.atom.io
The product/download site should be at http://code.visualstudio.com when it goes live later today (it's currently showing a login page).
Don't get me wrong---I'm as happy as the next guy about this. VS is the only tolerable language-dedicated IDE, if they take 25% of their VS engineering mantra to this it will be better than almost anything else.
But where does it end? I am clearly so not in touch with my inner mba. I just cannot even think of how what they are planning in the long run, here.
What's going on? Have they lost their minds? Is there a secret master plan? How realistic could that be? Is this the red giant to their eventual white dwarf?
Just... what?!
I hate sounding like an advertisement for MS, but it really isn't THAT much of a pivot. More adapting to keep those parts of income that used to come from server licenses now as services. Not even mentioning Azure as a target, which is probably the best bet for keeping legacy apps running while transitioning/refactor/rewrite to new generations.
With the free W10 upgrades for 7/8 users and a 30% cut of Windows Store sales, they stand to make some money. But they have to get developers back on their side first, otherwise the store stays dominated by garbage.
They're also supporting Objective-C now, with VS slupring up Xcode projects. Did not expect that one.
I haven't paid much attention to native apps either desktop or mobile. I've built my career understanding distributed systems/communications flows and web based fromt ends... To me most of that is a better experience than what little attempts I've made at front end platform development.
Though I will say that Azure is all about getting you to use non-VM services, to generate lockin to their platform.
http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1131
What I took from it is that Microsoft used to make all their money from Windows and Office, but now the company is looking to transition towards being a service company rather than a product company. As a service-oriented company, restricting developers towards a single platform doesn't really help them, so ultimately it's in Microsoft's best interest to get .NET out there as much as possible so that people will want to choose their services.
I won't admit to "getting it", but what I gather is that Microsoft want .NET to be a valid choice for everyone.
At this point, they want to do this with Azure services. Which is very easy to work against with very rich tools in .Net. They're extending this development ability to other platforms, so that hopefully people will choose to use .Net even if targeting other platforms in the hope that people will choose to deploy to Azure over other cloud providers in much the same way that I chose to deploy to windows a decade ago.
This doesn't even count migrations of existing applications, which may well be better off on Azure (in windows) with new systems under Linux. The past two years, I've spent supporting Windows applications where a next generation was moving to Linux (node/iojs). Right now I'm doing this against Azure.
Being pragmatic, I'm even using Azure Storage (queues, tables and blob) for migration data, which means I don't have to setup/configure/manage a bunch of servers to do these tasks. Setting up RabbitMQ isn't hard, but there's time involved. Setting up C* isn't hard either, but if the data is transitional (using azure tables to hold data exported from the old system, and queues to trigger import into the new), it doesn't make sense to configure my own server. After using these services, I may use them more deeply, I'm already using Azure Tables for my configuration settings even, so I don't have to maintain an etcd/consul cluster.
All of this said... while I am mindful of getting locked in, and do have a strategy for breaking out, and my core application data won't be in azure services... actually using them makes me consider using them more.
From my own experience, what they are doing is a legitimate strategy and far better than how they approached it early on, and may still be. I stopped attending .Net conferences/meetings about 4-5 years ago because they were turning into Azure sales presentations more than development presentations in general. This is also the same time node.js started to become a viable contender, and I started using it for web project client files (js merge/min, less etc).
I think it's apparent that Microsoft has admitted the reality that the operating system just doesn't matter any more - and you're not going to make money there.
So it's all about services, and Azure is one of the sources of those services.
- they have an history of discarding products on a whim,
- playing the strategic game and stifling smaller competitors,
- having a new CEO doesn't mean it's a new company. The people are still there, there are still fragmentation and silos, and the attitude.
Contrast this to Oracle/Java. Or about any other huge corporation.
Whatever it is, I'm not sure I've actually been excited about what Microsoft is doing since Windows 2000, and that's starting to change.
The Microsoft of old would have died out eventually. What we are seeing is not something you see often - a behemoth of a company doing a 'pivot'.
What would you do remain relevant in the face of the majority of the internet services not going anywhere near Microsoft for material income?
All of that said, outlook integration to office365 is actually worse as a mail client than it had been in the past with self-hosted Exchange. Counts don't update properly when you "delete all" from a folder, and even then it's inconsistent. I know it's to allow for better scale/resource control on the servers but it's still very annoying to say the least.
After a few generations raised on smartphones and tablets without any Microsoft apps, Microsoft Office would just be a curiosity their parents used, like Corel Draw or dBase.
Fortunately Microsoft has taken note; there's rumor of Android Office apps, and the latest version of the Surface tablet is quite popular.
Microsoft, and in particular, Office is still going strong, but the stranglehold it had in the 90's is gone.
--
Google may want businesses to pay, but going to docs.google.com and using your personal email address works just fine - much to the chagrin of IT departments everywhere.
Google Docs doesn't hold a candle against it while LibreOffice can barely sneeze in front of it.
What non-technical users request won't matter, they will ask for whatever they are familiar with and complain if any icon is moved just slightly.
MS is still corporate-centric in the US, and popular in foreign countries where Apple stores don't exist in large numbers.
In the US, perhaps. Where I study, I can count the number of people owning MacBooks on my fingers. They're still way too overpriced/lacking in hardware compared to PCs at the same market rates.
I like Google Docs as much as the next guy or girl, but I find this hard to believe when we had to end a meeting several minutes into it when the Google Doc displayed an http-500-style error when trying to load a spreadsheet.
A couple nitpicks...
* There doesn't seem to be a way to set the file encoding... can I assume that files will always be saved in UTF8 w/o BOM? * There doesn't seem to be a way to set line endings... can I assume that files will always be saved with unix (lf) line endings? By extension, will this fix windows line endings, or mixed to LF line endings? * It would be really nice if there was an integrated command prompt, similar to cloud9's, that could be shown/hidden. Configurable to use a given shell (in windows, I'd prefer a git-bash prompt).
All in all, really nice work, and this may well replace sublimetext everywhere for me. I don't use any of the more advanced plugins with sublime, and I actually like the VSC editor's UI more. They seem to have burrowed the hotkeys from sublimetext.
Jetbrains?
The .Net plaform that's used by enteprises and devs also in the Unix/OS X world?
This move was unthinkable a decade ago. I'm very glad to see MS moving in this direction. Just because of this announcement I want to start playing with TypeScript and C# again.
From Wikipedia: The strategy and phrase "embrace, extend and extinguish", was first introduced in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust trial when the vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, testified[8] that Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz used the phrase in a 1995 meeting with Intel to describe Microsoft's strategy toward Netscape, Java, and the Internet.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguis...
A lot of that changed starting with Windows 95. Though, it's really 1998 that MS practices in terms of embrace/extend/extinguish was at their top.
The school was lending special network card for the few pupils (less than 10 among 400) who had linux on their PC. The common network card (we had network plug in our rooms) was not supported by linux.
Even if linux was not mainstream, Cross-platform had already a meaning at that time and djgpp was well known to run programs on dos (for example caml-light, the ancestor of ocaml).
"Write once, run everywhere" is a threat to a company whose entire business model is based on "everywhere" being owned by them.
1. http://www.wired.com/2012/04/ff_andreessen/2/
> Windows3.1 > Windows95/NT > Macintosh > BSD > Linux > SunOS > Solaris > HP-UX > OSF/1 > Irix > AIX > OS/2 > OpenVMS VAX > OpenVMS Alpha
That's very much debatable. As a particular counterpoint, Apple hardware had a pretty significant market share among educational deployments. There were quite a few schools that were Mac-only even as late as the early/mid 2000s, let alone in the 90's.
Now granted, a big reason why that changed was because all the homes and businesses used Windows (or some specialized Unix like Solaris or IRIX), so the education market eventually shifted to the Windows world, but that happened quite a bit after the 90's.
You can read the full thread there, it's just 3 days old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9442011