We just got done giving a talk on NTVS & PTVS at Build in SF. The reception was great (given this is a primarily .net conference). I did an informal poll of the audience (180 or so), asking whether they were planning on deploying node/python in their enterprise. The response was around 75-85% Yes to both, which was somewhat higher that I had expected.
The cool new feature is this Beta are TypeScript integration, Remote debugging (inc. linux), Edit&Continue (no server restart), free edition (NTVS + VS Express), etc. and numerous bug fixes.
To address a few comments regarding strategy - most are correct, though some are over thinking it a bit :). The project was proposed & started by the PTVS (python) folks, and mgmt was rather lukewarm about it. It was definitely not part of some uber P1 strategy. I wish it was. However, since then it's gained some momentum thanks to the community and it's become important enough that Scott Guthrie mentioned it in his keynote, and Soma (SVP for developer division) just blogged about it.
a few new videos (pls excuse the production, we do our own videos...)
new npm UI (community contributed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwSzxFY5CMI
twitter sentiment app -- https://youtu.be/9tf6HmG9VAA
remote debugging https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4
For ref, I deal with Microsoft a lot and wrote a ton of c# over the least decade (more than anything else probably) so I'm not biased against necessarily but all-encompassing announcements like the ones over the last couple of weeks make me suspicious.
Edit: to extend my thoughts on this some more:
I don't think we're seeing embrace and extend. I think we're seeing "go on - use our tooling". Once you're in a tool ecosystem it's hard to get out of. I mean really hard. Same goes with cloud ecosystems which neatly integrate with their tooling. Their offering is to host all of your stuff (Azure) and mediate between you and what you're working on (Office/VS/Xamarin potentially).
A fully heterogenous system with a sole vendor mediating your access becomes an interesting situation when for political, financial or legal reasons you want or need to leave.
"A fully heterogenous system with a sole vendor mediating your access" is a good thing for these companies.
I do a lot of contract work for state and local governments. They are already fully invested in SQL Server, IIS and Active Directory. For both these organizations and myself as a contractor to them I see the increased openness of Microsoft as only a good thing.
Just like the ASP stack and it's rapid advancements. They know if they don't start innovating fast they'll be finished.
I'll just welcome the added support, and hope that it leads to better acceptance of my prefered tools in more conservative environments.
So what's next for MS? I think they are getting the direction right for opening up for external MS product users, and now it's time to recruit top talent again. There are just too many great hackers think MS is old (just look at some of replies in this story), which to large degree is true, and it will take time to fix that, but it can be possible done with: 1) create openness [culture, keep taking more open-source project like open-day-light, keep opening tech inside MS to others, etc.]; 2) buy early-stage companies through acqui-hire. It will be an uphill-battle and I am not an expert on this, and I am very interested in what other people here on HN thinks.
I once saw a presentation of the Visual Studio lead in Belgium, where he claimed that there were over 1200 people involved in the Visual Studio project. If that's true, i don't think there is any IDE that can top that number and it explains why Visual Studio is the best tool for (almost any) job.
People should realize that Visual Studio is not solely C#, it's NodeJS, PHP, Mono, Python, javascript and so much more in one environment (with a good autocompletion). If you have Windows and are a developer, i suggest you to install one of the Express editions, just to try it out.
I must admit, not everything is "as awesome as it is" in the express versions because of some limitations on extensions, but in my experience, you can do everything you need in the Express editions. But i don't think visual studio wouldn't be as good as it is, if it was free or opensource. (replacing 1200 developers would be very hard).
PS. Can anyone confirm my statement of 1200 developers/freelancers? I really think that's the number the Visual Studio lead developer mentioned.
I don't know who you think the "great hackers" are that Microsoft should hire, but Microsoft is overflowing with top talent. They don't need to "recruit top talent again", because they already were and long have been.
The research division of Microsoft was created in 1991 and employs computer scientists, physicists, engineers, and mathematicians, including Turing Award winners, Fields Medal winners, MacArthur Fellows, and Dijkstra Prize winners. These 1,100 scientists and engineers collaborate with academic, government, and industry researchers to advance the state of the art of computing, and solve difficult world problems through technological innovation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research
Microsoft's problem is management, not talent. They already some of the best talent money can buy.
> 2) buy early-stage companies through acqui-hire.
Why would Microsoft benefit from hiring inexperienced teams out of startups on the acquihire market?
http://nodejstools.codeplex.com/releases/view/104141
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4
It was in the original title, but has been edited out.
1) "Set Next Statement" doesn't work, which is a pretty big part of E&C
2) I could change code and literals without stopping and restarting the debugging session. Each change causes the current statement to jump to the top of the current function, or to the first line if modifying code outside of any function. Local variables are reset, but globals retain their state.
3) Interestingly, I could change code in a function that does not have the focus, and nothing is reset, then step into that function.
I remember seeing something similar when V8 was being demoed and showed a "live edit" capability, so I guess NTVS has similar functionality.
It short, it sort of works, but it's not the same as E&C for .Net (C# or VB), C/C++ native code, or Office VBA.
Sadly the only reason I keep my windows based desktop around these days is PC gaming is still very much windows based.
Which node modules are problem children?
What version of VS did you need? Some of the information on getting gyp working was like VS2008 SP1, plus the Win7.1 SDK.
If this is no longer true, I'll give it a whirl.
`npm install <module> -msvs_version=2013`
There is an incredible amount of web technologies and dev tools coming from ms that are being presented at Build 2014. In fact so many that I'm having a hard time keeping up...
As with most Microsoft stuff, you get a great fully integrated story if you use their whole stack, but if you want to swap one one piece it falls apart a little. My clients have compliance issues that make cloud providers hard to use so it's disappointing that I can't really use all this coon new stuff.
It also appears to work with the free version of VS (Visual Studio Express).
Now on this Node.JS IDE, it actually makes me want to use Node.js because it's on Visual Studio, however, I'm also open to alternative IDE.
My favorite is Jetbrain's IDE products, I use webstorm and phpstorm, and pycharms. I love them all, would be nice if they had one for Node.js, as I'm not sure if webstorm has extensive support for it.
In the first case I see a LOT of devs using windows as main os, I can easily say the big part of them use it. My last job was in a full lamp 3yo startups and ironically I was the only one who had a second partition with linux on my laptop. All the other devs where on windows7/8 and only 2 on osx.
In case of server yes, usally you use windowsServer only if you use asp.net or maybe node.js. It however depens
Anyway if you want to just use Azure Websites it is really nice to have all those Sdks for visual studio.
I didn't see the stats, but most developers I know use Windows. Like, 60% or so. Different area, different industry?
