Is it time for cloud-based ASP.NET IDE? (round 2)

8 months ago, I asked whether it is time for cloud-based ASP.NET IDE. I have long been dreaming of being able to create web application on the spot while talking to users. I was able to do that 20 years ago with VB3. Today, the closest thing I can do with web application is with a CMS like Orchard. To work on a live website, we need an editor that is accessing the live site. We also need a tool to indicate the link between the html in the browser and the code that generate the html.

A lot has happened in the past 8 months. For the cloud based editor, first I saw Scott Hanselman’s blog about Microsoft’s own cloud editor. Then we found this editor to appear in Visual Studio Online.

For the tools that link html with source code, I first saw the very impressive shape tracing tool in Orchard. Then we saw the browser link and remote debugging feature in Visual Studio 2013.

So whether the IDE itself is in the cloud or not, the new VS2013 features together with the Azure feature of deploying directly from a repository brings up ever close to being able to work on a live web application in front of a customer.