Technology giant Microsoft yesterday announced a private preview launch of Visual Studio Online, a consortium of 3 new coding “capabilities” as they coined them, to enable developers to work from anywhere, and on any device, when they need it.
This new Visual Studio Online tool has been positioned as a ‘second arm’ so-to-speak for the existing Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code programs.
In the announcement on their DevBlogs platform, Microsoft’s Jonathan Carter said that these new ‘capabilities’ are direct addresses to the increasing complexity developers are facing in terms of time-to-market demands, multiple new technologies being used, and the fact that teams are more and more geographically separated (as is the nature of international and multinational businesses).
For tech wizards out there that find this stuff interesting, this new service is based on Microsoft’s free and open-source desktop code editor, and will support all of the extensions of Visual Studio Code that are currently available to you.
And the trick here is not to confuse this for your main, go-to development environment; as is clear from the announcement, this is a companion designed to allow you to make small edits on-the-go as you need, or to join a Live Share session with your team.
What’s exciting about this is that Microsoft are very openly working with developers on this service, collecting live feedback and adjusting as they go. So for the developers out there – make sure to check out the private preview and use the service. It is very clearly being built and designed for you, and to some extent, by you!
Have you used the service? What do you think of it? Let us know in the comments!
