Announcing Visual Studio Online
We have been up early this morning and late last night with getting ready for updates to the new visualstudio.com website, Windows Azure, and the now formerly known as Team Foundation Service. Hopefully you are watching the Visual Studio 2013 Launch Event where you have just learned that we have announced a new set of services for developers and development teams: Visual Studio Online. It has really been great to be working so closely with Visual Studio Online at Microsoft!
There are quite a few announcements this morning that I’ll continue to follow-up on over the next few weeks. Visual Studio Online is really about where Visual Studio is going in a world of services for developers & development teams. It’s really the connected piece to Visual Studio just like Office is to Office 365 & SkyDrive. It’s also an easy way to get all of the ALM services you need quickly for you and your team without having to worry about infrastructure & upgrading. Visual Studio Online is also a way for Microsoft to provide additional cloud-based services for development teams. We have a few examples of those types of shared services today.
Some additional news we have announced are that individuals and teams of five or less can create free Visual Studio Online accounts. MSDN Subscribers also now have Visual Studio Online included as an additional benefit. There are an additional set of Visual Studio Online plans available for non-MSDN subscribers after the fifth user account. Additionally, the Visual Studio Online Professional plan even includes the ability to “rent” the Visual Studio Professional IDE. Early adopters of Team Foundation Service are also grandfathered with “Early Adopter” status for 90 days which means you can continue to use Visual Studio Online without any additional costs during the early adopter period. During the “commercial preview” of Visual Studio Online, all plans & services are reduced by 50% of their normal rates.
Each Visual Studio Online account has a set of consumable shared services as well which include a free base amount like 60 minutes of cloud build usage and 15,000 virtual user minutes of the cloud load testing service.
Another aspect of Visual Studio Online is that it is now integrated with Windows Azure so you can have a more consolidated management experience and simplified billing experience. You can create a new Visual Studio Online account or link to an existing one in the Windows Azure Management Portal.
Tip: All Visual Studio Online user plans and shared services receive the same discounts that your Windows Azure account receives based on your commitment level. It’s also included in the commitment level so you can reach those commitment levels more easily and receive the same discount across all Windows Azure resources including infrastructure, storage, and now developer services. The lowest “walk-up” discount level is 20% based on paying monthly and a $500 per month commitment on all Windows Azure & Visual Studio Online resources. It goes up from there and if you are an Enterprise, you can get some pretty awesome discounts when adding an Windows Azure Commitment to your Enterprise Agreement.
If you want to learn more, there is an Introduction to Visual Studio Online overview video available at the Visual Studio 2013 Virtual Launch site. I will update the blog post and include the link when it becomes live.
There is plenty more to come! Keep up to date on the latest features & services that are being added to Visual Studio Online here:
- Release Archive: http://www.visualstudio.com/news/release-archive-vso
- News Feed: http://www.visualstudio.com/news/news-overview-vs
Have fun and let me know if you have any questions!
Ed Blankenship
