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Saturday, November 16, 2013

IamA Microsoft ASP.NET and Web Tools Team (and Azure) on reddit

Yesterday, Scott Hanselman, Damian Edwards and  Mads Kristensen from Microsoft were at Reddit answering people's questions and future of lot of things around web/cloud development and Microsoft. The transcript was quite informative and interesting to read. If you are a web developer using any of Microsoft's technologies or are apssionate about cloud, I highly recommend following the transcript here - AMA

I am yet to go through the whole transcript but here are some of the exciting bits I got to know about from the chat


  1. They talked about how the OSS initiative started at Microsoft. How Phil Haack and ScootGu played an important role and where the OSS initiative is headed. It was interesting to know that guys have managed to open source a lot of things in last couple of years. It was also nice to know that they promote external open source .NET based web frameworks like Nanacy, ServiceStack and Oak etc.
  2. Katana  project is getting serious attention. Do not be surprised if one day ASP.NET MVC works completely off Katana without any dependency on System.Web. If you have no clue what I am talking about - System.Web is part of BCL and is not open sourced. Where as, ASP.NET MVC is open sourced. MVC takes dependency on System.Web as of now which is a problem because their release cycles are not synchronised and MVC team cannot add new features to System.Web.If you are interested, the roadmap for Katana project is here 
  3. Rewriting project file structure - Microsoft is listening to people's complaints about pains of XML based project file. They are working on building a new project file formats that enable more collaboration with less conflicts after committing project files. It is not clear when this would be released.
  4. Offline NuGet - Again, they are listening. They are working on ideas to make NuGet available offline. Again, no news on when this would be available but effort is going on.
  5. Folks at Microsoft have interest in seeing remote debugging in browsers initiative. Visit their website to know more about the initiative. It would be a good boost of web developer's productivity if this initiative sees the light of the day.
  6. BrowserLink and Side-Waffle project - There are lot of interesting things happening around BrowserLink and Side-Waffle project. Take a look at Side-Waffle's github page
  7. SASS and LESS support in visual Studio - VS2013 has SAAS editor to make the lives of graphic designers among us easy. And they are actively working on a LESS editor for upcoming release.
  8. TypeScript - TypeScript team is working on visual studio tooling for TypeScript from ground up. This is in order to offer a richer experience. They are hoping to release TypeScript 1.0 and tooling support in Visual Studio together
  9. ASP.NET Web Pages - Mind you, this is not Web Forms. I did not know this existed. Take a look here - Web Pages
  10. What's happening in the world of Visual Studio
  11. Microsoft's Partnership with Xamarin and what's in future around building cross-platform mobile apps in C#
Besides the above they talk a lot about future of EF, MVC and SignalR in general, what helped them reach where they are, life at Microsoft and lot of other things. The transcript is worth reading. Here is the link again - http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1qp91h/iama_we_are_microsoft_aspnet_and_web_tools_team/

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