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.

Getting back to Visual Studio Online, it seems like a great idea if you require some fancier setup to do your job. Sometimes you may need the processing power to compile a monster project or a specific setup for it, which the cloud can give you -- whereas your laptop or desktop at work may not be as flexible.

"Increasing computational and data workloads (e.g. Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data), powered by cloud computing, are naturally shifting development activities beyond the 'standard issue development laptop'," says Microsoft. Who can argue with that?

Microsoft says that it's designed Visual Studio Online to scale well (one can create as many environments as their subscription allows) and be affordable (customers only need to pay for the time they used those environments).

As a result of using it, Microsoft says that your device at work will have a lower load, and enable you to do other stuff on it, like "edit media assets, email, chat, stream music, or do anything else." Are you thinking what I am thinking? Yes, we can now have more browser tabs open in Chrome and faster tab switching too. Awesome stuff!

Kidding aside, we do do more than just write code on our machines these days and, even without a fully-fledged IDE running, our machines can feel sluggish after some time. When running multiple instances in debug mode, they can slow down to a crawl in no time.

But, and this is a big but, it's that element of familiarity that I mentioned in the beginning that's hard to ignore. So, to make the move to the cloud easy, Microsoft is enabling developers to use Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio to connect to those environments.

Basically, you get to use your favorite IDE still, but your code is going to end up in a machine somewhere in Azure pretty quickly. It'll be interesting to see just how much latency we are looking at, but I suspect it should work just fine if you have a decent connection.

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?

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