I’ve been pushing for HTML5 tools for some time now. Today, the VIsual Studio team announced a VM that you can instantly deploy in Azure, which comes pre-installed with everything that you’ll need to get going with writing iOS (yes, in Visual Studio), Android, and Windows apps in Visual Studio. No crazy downloading and installing of tons of apps and extensions to get going.
If you need more resources on Cordova, check out Raymond Camden’s blog, which offers tons of in-depth information, and how to get started tutorials.
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
Source: Visual Studio Blog
-----------------------@DaveVoyles
First, thanks for the callout – much appreciated. 🙂
I’m a bit confused – what do these VMs do? For iOS, for example, is it an OSX VM so you can generate IPAs via the Cordova CLI? For Android, is it a Unix system w/ the Android SDK?
That biggest selling point behind the VM is that you don’t need to download or install anything.
They are all pre-configured and auto-updated to have the latest updates. So you go to the VM gallery, say “I want Win8 pre-installed with Cordova, Visual Studio, and the cross platform tools” and it boots up that machine.
There isn’t an OSX VM (damn you, legal), so right now they are just emulating iOS. You would still need an OSX environment with Xcode installed to attached your developer certificate.
As far as Android, it is running a simulator for testing, but it also downloads and installed eclipse and the Android SDK in the VM, which is what allows you to attached your Google Dev certificate and deploy to the store.
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