Experience with Visual Studio Online

Today I opened my Visual Studio and saw a notification on the news feed of it. “VS 2013: Announcing Visual Studio Online”. Amazed by the idea and quickly searched for it and since MS has its own free trial packages for every product they release, I signed up for it. Here is my initial experience with Visual Studio Online:

1. I am really impressed by Microsoft a lot these days. Their openness to the other technologies and integrating their products with other standard technologies. One such example is the use GIT in their online product. While creating a project VS online gave me an option to create a source control using the GIT.



2. Once a test project is created the page is redirected to a team page wherein the VS team maintained its consistency of the process we use while creating the project. A quick preview of how to work with Code, Work, Build and Test tabs gives a complete reference guide on How to use the application



3. Agile is completely available within the browser, that what I see:
   • Create a Product backlog
   • Create a Sprint backlog
   • Create a Bug, Feature, etc

   

   • Pin your work items or the work items you want to track closely
   • Team members
   • Team rooms for discussions and announcements
   • Graphical overview of the progress of the product
   • Create your own custom filtered queries for the work items and check the collection
4. A Sprint Overview of the project. Any stakeholder can easily get to know the status of a project and this is a way to capture risks and provide a resolutions



5. Automating the build is one lovely thing for a developer and the administrators. That is how team server build always made it on the top thing for a project. And now its here in your browser



6. A complete Test plan available.



7. Coming to the CODE tab (my fav), it gave me an option to clone on my local before I get started



8. Here is the explorer view of the solution that is being created. I say its kinda similar to Git but with the extensive VS features.



9. I am unable to get a review of the IDE in browser though but there is based on the monaco with Windows Azure.

I hope this will be a rise of the VS platform. Lots of potentiality for the Projects and as a team.

Happy Coding!!!