Visual Studio Online announced earlier this month by S. Somasegar, Corporate Vice President (Developer Division) at Microsoft is a giant step in the cloud computing division. It equips developers with a wide range of developing services and tools, giving developer power to develop application in the cloud.
Visual Studio has grown from a desktop Integrated Developer Environment to team development proficiencies on the server (using the Team Foundation Server). But Visual Studio Online brings about the new undistinguished phase offering the best cohesive endways development experience for the latest, freshest applications.
With the announcement of the Visual Studio Online, Microsoft and Xamarin have expanded the horizons of the .NET developers. Now several devices including Android and iOS have become reachable for developers due to the Visual Studio Online. Xamarian is written in C# and the framework allows you to share code between platforms. You can use your c# skills to make mobile applications and target multiple platforms through Xamarian.
Let us understand this whole thing in a better way:-
Firstly , Visual studio Online is the fast and the best way to plan , develop and build your application in a very easy way. You can setup the whole platform for your team from tracking tools to hosted git repositries . Moreover You did not need to install a server , simply get started and start development.
Visual Studio Online has several new services, including the Visual Studio Online “Monaco” and Visual Studio Online Application Insights in addition to the elastic load testing service available in the public preview to enhance your cloud experience.
Hosted Source Control
Developers can use the hosted source control using either Team Foundation Version Control or Git. After logging into the Visual Studio this service helps the sources for your Visual Studio Online projects to sync with your desktop.
Tools Supporting Development Process
It comes with tools supporting the entire development process throughout from the next sprint planning, to managing an item backlog of a project’s work.
Hosted Build Service
This service helps you move your project’s builds, with ease, to the cloud. Plus the Visual Studio Online account provides sixty minutes of free build time each month; this makes you to get started with the hosted build in a easy manner.
Elastic Load Test Service
With this service scalability to the cloud, necessary load testing can be offloaded. And this elastic load test service is available in the public preview for the Visual Studio users.
Application Understanding
It provides a visibility of the application and acts as a monitoring and an analytics tool. The Application Insights gathers the live telemetry data transversely from development, production and test environments along with capturing the availability, usage data and the performance. It provides a 360-degree assessment of an application’s health to the developers/teams. This important data then gets connected to the entire development lifecycle of the developer.
Monaco: Online Code Editor
One of the most interesting service of Visual studio 2013 is "Monaco" - It is a coding environment in the cloud and for the cloud. Monaco enables a low friction experience supporting desktop IDE. It is a rich , browser based and code focused development environment optimized for windows Azure Platform.This service, fully assimilated with the Visual Studio Online, is useful in helping you to get started smoothly and also helps in making changes to any prevailing cloud service quickly.
Visual Studio Online is free for the teams that have up to 5 users and Visual Studio Online is also included with MSDN subscriptions. so now you can start your development in the cloud with VS Online 2013 .
Steps for starting Development in Visual studio Online: Getting Started
1. You need to login windows Azure Management Portal
2.Create a NEW WEBSITE
3.open site setting and config page
4.scroll down and turn "Edit in visual Studio" on
5.Go to website dashboard and "edit in visual studio online link"
6. Now you can start your development process.
Thats all , HAPPY DEVELOPMENT :)