How would I develop apps if I had a Cloud Only PC?
I'm looking at the Acer-AC700-1099-Chromebook-Wi-Fi on Amazon.
The idea is kind of neat, and I can see this being the way more PCs are going to go. Nothing installed on your PC - you are basically running a "dumb terminal" that lives off an Internet connection.
So far, the biggest concern has been that apps like PhotoShop can not be run on them.
As programmers, most of us don't care about PhotoShop, but we need to compile our C#!
Does anyone have any information on whether some form of Cloud Compiling is in the works?
Maybe my employer would be able to purchase an X-License copy of Visual Studio that is installed on the server and I'd just log into that to develop all of my apps.
This is totally doable. I would suggest that you/your employer take a look at XenDesktop. This is technology that lets you run Windows Virtual Machines in your own private cloud. Then to access these machines you run a "thin client" which is basically like a Remote Desktop session. The thin client can run on a normal laptop, an iPad, and even Google ChromeOS. The basics of this technology are free, and not that hard to setup.
See these articles here which are Citrix announcing support for ChromeOS.
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=2311983
http://lazure2.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/chromebook-box-with-citrix-receiver-going-against-microsoft/
The coolest part about this, is you are using a Chromebook which is a cloud only laptop to access the public cloud AND your own private cloud. Pretty cloudy in here :)
Given that Visual Studio is Windows-only, you have to run Windows somewhere - either on your local PC (not an option with Chrome) or on some remote server (and access it via some web-based RDP client IF such beast exists and works with Chrome). I.e. the question can be split in two - where to get the powerful server system to run VS on it (and don't forget that compilation is resource-consuming, so the server system is to be very powerful if several users work on it in parallel), and how to connect to remote Windows system using Chrome OS. Both of those questions are offtopic here ;).
Related
I don't see a VM for Edge listed on http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/mac/
Is there currently a way to do this?
Browserstack has Edge available as one of its options. In addition, you can try out the remote.modern.ie to test this via a free cloud version of Windows 10
Link to all of this, and more resources on GitHub
Testing the application using RemoteIE & BrowserStack
There are several ways of testing websites, aside from the good old-fashioned way of using a device lab and physically looking at your site on multiple devices and in multiple browsers. Two of the more popular and easier ways to go about testing include modern.IE remoteIE and BrowserStack.
RemoteIE
RemoteIE is a free service offered by modern.IE that allows you to connect to a hosted version of the latest IE builds running in the cloud using a client. This client, called the Azure RemoteApp Client, is available for Mac OS X, iOS, Android and Windows OS devices, and includes simple installation and account set up steps. The available IE builds run on Windows 10 Technical Preview for Enterprise. In this preview version of the service, only public URLs and IP addresses can be accessed.
Other tools offered by modern.IE include:
Virtual Machines with versions of IE ranging from IE6 to IE11, that can be downloaded and managed in your own development environment.
Browser Screenshots of how your site looks across nine common browsers and devices.
Compatibility reports generated from analyzing your site while it runs to detect patterns of interactions known to cause issues in browsers.
Site scans for common coding problems in your website.
BrowserStack
RemoteIE has partnered with BrowserStack to provide interactive browser testing in the cloud, regardless of the platform, and within your own browser.
BrowserStack is a paid online service, but you can sign up for a free trial. With BrowserStack it is possible to test internal websites or local html designs using remote browsers after configuring for local testing, so the website does not have to be live to test it out. Signing up for the free trial gives you a 30-minute session to test the website in a broad range of platforms and browsers. The full list of browsers & mobile devices for live testing can be found here.
My next work project is going to be using the Meteor framework. Our team recently got licensed to use WebStorm IDE, which has been our favorite up until this point. so we were planning on continuing the project with it.
That is, until it was time to install it. Then we found out that the Windows version of Meteor is only partially finished, and all of our development PC's are windows based.
So we were considering as a work-around for this, we may use Cloud9 as our development IDE, as it supports Meteor. The sharing functions may help our team productivity a bit as well.
But this has some problems...
First, we just invested in WebStorm, so we would ideally like to use it as our primary IDE. But I do not know how we would be able to work with WebStorm if we can not run an up to date version of Meteor on our windows systems?
Second, I'm not sure if it's even possible to use Cloud9 as the development IDE, but then move the C9 project over to our Ubuntu server for hosting when it is time to go live?
Third, even if we could deploy to our Ubuntu server after C9, we plan on many updates to our live application after deployment. I'm not sure if there would be issues with this if our development is on C9 and deployment on a completely different server.
So I'm wondering if anyone has a potential solution for these issues? Is there any way for us to work with Meteor on our live Ubuntu server, or Cloud9, from WebStorm on our Windows systems? Or any way we could integrate Cloud9 and WebStorm together for the best of both worlds? Or any way we could use a Linux emulator or something to allow us to use Meteor on our local windows system, without making it difficult for multiple developers to work on the project at the same time?
Thanks in advance!
The Windows port of Meteor actually is working quite well; the only major issue is that mobile development doesn't work. That is going to be fixed in Meteor 1.1 anyway, whose primary goal is to get Windows support up to that of Linux and Mac OS X.
As the user who initially pushed for Webstorm to add Meteor support back in October 2012, I'd recommend starting with Webstorm and Meteor on Windows right away, unless you need mobile development. In that case, you need native *nix machine (an Ubuntu VM on Windows won't be able to run the Android emulator, for example).
WebStorm also supports server-side Meteor debugging, and they're pretty responsive when it comes to fixing bugs you report on YouTrack. See for example https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WEB-13490
With Cloud9, you cannot currently SSH into a workspace you have, so a hybrid Webstorm/Cloud9 situation might not be doable at this point.
As for deploying your stuff from Cloud9, that is very doable. There's some documentation here about that: https://docs.c9.io/v1.0/docs/deploying-via-the-command-line
This question already has answers here:
Is there a IE tester for mac? [closed]
(7 answers)
Closed 10 years ago.
I'm a webmaster that use mac platform to develop. Can someone suggest me the best way to test my website with IExplorer using a Mac? There're some virtualizer such as parallel, crossover, wine and so on, can someone suggest me the best for this purpose?
Or some other workaround is appreciated (i really don't need an entire copy of windows, only to test my websites on IE6 and IE7 using my mac)
First: Look at the question linked to in the comments. If you just need to see what a site looks like, browsershots.org will do the trick. But if you need to fully test and debug, you need Windows. But that can be done too:
Purchase Parallels Desktop
Download free Windows virtual machines directly from Microsoft made specifically for this purpose. You can rename the .exe self-extracting archives .rar instead, and unpack with anything that can extract RAR files
Import the resulting virtual machine image into Parallels, and you're done
Just know that many of the Windows images are huge. You'll need something like 40GB free to download, unpack and convert the Windows Vista and Windows 7 images (once you're done, you can of course toss a bunch of stuff out again)
Edit: Oh, yeah, forgot to mention: The Windows images last about 3 months at a time before they lock down completely, and you have to download a fresh copy. Microsoft obviously isn't giving away fully-fledged Windows copies for free :)
One option is to join MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network subscription) to get access to all Windows versions in all languages etc. You can install those you need in separate Parallels virtual machines (VMWare and virtualbox would work as well).
This allows you to install the exact version some customer happens to have, e.g. certain old Windows Server with certain IE version, etc to replicate the environment for testing and regression testing.
I would say that virtual machine installations are a must so you get the exact complete real thing.
MSDN has different options, "OS only" would be probably enough for this need (I had other needs for Windows development tools as well so got the full MSDN). MSDN has a cost (on the order of $1k/year) but was worth it to get access to everything for development and testing purposes.
PS. The only fun thing was that as a Mac-based UNIX developer I had many versions of Windows and many versions of Linux installed on my MacBook, but only one installation of OSX ;-) Some people also thought it was fun to see a "Mac developer" with "MSDN subscription", but whatever gets the work done, is the way to go.
I've developed some Java applications and wrapped them in exe files, some of them require JDIC files, the apps run on Windows systems, since my PC is all setup for development, it has all the necessary parts, but if a user downloads and runs my apps, they may not work as I thought. So I wonder if there is any place online that I can upload my apps and try to run them in a Windows environment and see if they work in the simulation ?
Frank
Consider using VirtualPC. You can get licensing for free.
Also you can get images from MS site for various versions of Windows to test with - supposedly for browser compatibility but you can use them for other things (which may or may not violate the EULA).
Consider using VMWare Workstation. You can get licensing for free.
You could use Amazon's EC2 instances to get easy access to virtual Windows machines. There is a bit of set up involved, but once you've done that you can spin up new machines easily enough. There are a number of tutorials online.
However, doing it locally with virtual windows instances is going to be even easier. I'd second VMware workstation or player.
You can download trial Windows server images directly from Microsoft for free.
I'm developing a Java app on the Windows platform, and my application needs to send email. For development/testing purposes, what is an easy and free email server I can run on Windows?
If you're not running the low-end Home edition of Windows then there is a SMTP server built in (Install IIS and components).
But maybe you want a 'fake' server, one that only pretends to forward mail. Look for Dumbster or the .NET port NDumbster
I have had good luck with MailEnable. It's free and fairly easy to set up.