As part of providing pre-release versions of Visual Studio running as Azure Virtual Machines (VMs), we now provide you with an easy way to test drive the Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova.
If you didn’t already know, we announced earlier this year that we are going to integrate Apache Cordova into Visual Studio. This will help developers use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to build, debug, and deploy hybrid JavaScript apps that run on Android, iOS, and Windows devices. Unfortunately, not all customers have the necessary configuration to install these tools. Our pre-configured VMs help with this.
With the pre-configured VM, you can do anything you would in a local development environment - including building and debugging apps for Windows Store and Android. Each VM comes with a pre-installed sample project and Getting Started documentation that will help you build your first packaged app.
To learn how you can provision your VM, check out this MSDN article: How to Create a Virtual Machine on Azure. You can use any image from the VM gallery that mentions Cordova:
There is a cost associated with running these VMs on Azure, but if you are an MSDN Subscriber, you have free Azure credits that you can use towards running this VM. The MSDN Subscriber Benefits page has the details.
We are looking at more ways of making it easier for you to evaluate our tools, so let us know if you find these VMs helpful or have ideas on how we can improve in the future. If you run into any issues or have questions, you can connect directly with the product team via UserVoice, Twitter, StackOverflow, or email.
Cheers,
Kirupa
 | Kirupa Chinnathambi, Program Manager, Visual Studio Client Team Kirupa Chinnathambi is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio team where he spends a lot of time thinking about how to improve the HTML developer experience. When he isn’t busy writing short bios of himself for blog posts, he can be found on twitter, Facebook, and on kirupa.com. |