This is the new strategy by Microsoft, isn’t it?
At least it’s what their boss said: http://news.microsoft.com/2014/03/27/satya-nadella-mobile-first-cloud-first-press-briefing/
I don’t want to discuss if this is useful but I am quite sure that for many companies it’s not. Usually you don’t want to store sensible data „somewhere“ in the cloud. But that’s a different story.
Yesterday I was approved to the Microsoft BizSpark program. This is really cool – you have to register your company – in my case a „one man company“ 😉 – to take part in this program. If you are approved, you get 3 years of free access to the whole MSDN library (all development tools, office, all windows versions, …)
The package also includes access to windows azure with a value of 150$/month.
Until now I never knew what to do with azure. 🙂
This website is not hosted on azure. I have no apps that require a „service in the background“ to run on an azure server and I also have no use for a database hosted on azure.
But what is interesting for me: You can easily setup a virtual machine in azure and you can even choose from some preconfigured systems.
So I created a virtual server with 4GB Ram, 100GB HD and a pre-installed Visual Studio 2015. 🙂
I wanted to test Visual Studio 2015 but I did not want to install it on my „working machine“ which I need for my daily work so this was an ideal solution to test universal app development in Visual Studio 2015…at least this is what I thought.
As a side note: I don’t know how much this virtual server costs at the moment but the bizspark subscription has an automatic limitation so you cannot exceed the „free quota“.
After setting up the virtual machine and accessing it via remote desktop I was impressed: Now that was simple 🙂 It took about 1 minute to get all of this running…would have taken much longer, when installing it on my local pc.
No Hyper-V support which is mandatory for the windows phone/windows store emulator
After starting VS2015 I created a universal app from the template just to „see it running“ on azure. But: It did not run. 🙁
An error was shown that Hyper-V is not enabled. So after some „google research“ I found out that Hyper-V needs to be activated on the server, which I tried.
Next problem: Hyper-V cannot be activated on windows azure. 🙁
Please see: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/windowsapps/en-US/14e8ef8d-dc87-4b9d-b41f-d7bf61ea3243/windows-phone-emulator-error-hyperv-components-not-running-windows-81-hosted-in-vmware-player?forum=wpdevelop
This means: Developing and testing apps for windows phone or windows store is not possible in windows azure. 🙁
In other words: Developing mobile apps is not possible on a server „on the cloud“.
Is this the new „mobile first, cloud first“ strategy by MS? :/
Some may say that this is a „hardware limitation“, which is some kind of „true“ but it IS possible to enable Hyper-V emulation in VM-Ware, please see: http://developer.nokia.com/community/wiki/Windows_Phone_8_SDK_on_a_Virtual_Machine_with_Working_Emulator
So developing for MS is not possible in a MS-only environment (phone emulator, visual studio, windows 2012 server running on azure), it’s better to use VM-Ware on your local computer.
Something I did not expect, when trying out azure for the first time…