Live Version of VS.NET?
John Montgomery from the VS.NET team posted something today about an idea that MS has been floating in private for a few weeks - creating a 'Live' version of VS.NET:
http://blogs.msdn.com/johnmont/archive/2006/01/11/511402.aspx
I have mixed feeling on this one. I was one of the 7 people (outside of Microsoft...) that was REALLY exicted about Hailstorm a few years back when they started talking publically about it...I even wrote an article on! I still remember attending the big unveiling they had in Redmond where everyone from Verizon to eBay to Groove showed really compelling demos of how they were planning to leverage Hailstorm services to make our online lives better.
Obviosuly Hailstorm died on the vine for a bunch of good (and some not-so-good...) reasons. Now we have Hailstorm 2.0 rebranded as 'Live' and Microsoft is once again taking a shot at providing online services that will make our lives better. Interestingly this time around Microsoft has done a lot more marketing of the Live concept and released a lot fewer detials about what Live is.
In his post, John is intentionally vague about what services Microsoft is considering integrating into VS.NET. I spoke with John about this a few weeks back and floated some ideas I think would be of use:
- Killer Hosted Team Development...Focued on Students: Provide a simple free way for a team of developers to work together on a project. Give them everything Sourceforge provides, but integrated it right into the IDE. This would be killer for college students working on class projects together.
- Integrated Community Managed Documentation: Think MSDNpedia integrated into the IDE. Give developers quick context appropriate content from the community along with enabling developers to contribute and edit contet from the IDE.
- Opt-In Framework Usage Analysis: Tool integrated into the IDE that would analyze the framework APIs that are used most frequently along with rich metadata about the use case (e.g. ISV, corp developer, hobbyst...). Tie this to the documentation above and you would have a killer set of documentaiton that can be tailored to a specific user's needs.
Have other/better ideas? John is looking for feedback and they are early enough in the planning stages for your feedback to make a difference...post a comment!