Microsoft Corporate Vice President Soma Somasegar announced the public release of Visual Studio Online today. Visual Studio Online brings development capabilities to any device capable of running a modern web browser. This represents a big change for Microsoft in its delivery of VS, as it now can be used on a variety of platforms including iPad, Android, Windows RT, and similar devices as opposed to the traditional Windows desktop platform.
VSO provides a unified offering that combines some existing operations previously provided by Team Foundation Service with new features developed under a project codenamed “Monaco”. The new VSO’s capabilities fall into two general areas: those related to application lifecyle maintenance or the process of the software development, and the capabilities of a traditional IDE experience. The ALM features include hosted source control, tracking backlog items, and a build service. The IDE portion currently supports creating and editing Azure web sites.
Another feature VSO offers is a tool called Application Insights, which is designed to provide “live telemetry data” on applications in production. This information is intended to provide data on performance and usage. Currently labeled a preview Application Insights supports .NET and Java applications, Windows Phone 8, and web applications. Separately, VSO will offer an Elastic Load Testing Service allowing developers to test their application with a configurable amount of concurrent users to point out weak spots or poorly performing code. Finally VSO will offer the ability to provide a build
Support for VSO is also now part of Visual Studio Express, and this combination supports groups of up to five users at no charge, meaning smaller groups of developers can easily develop software for the Microsoft platform without an upfront monetary investment. Users of Visual Studio 2012 can receive support for VSO through the newly released Update 4.
