7 things you didn't know you can do with your browser

I know I have been walking around for too long saying the release is "two weeks away". Well... As it turns out, we needed a little bit more time. Like, 3 years or so. Still - this baby is out and it's kicking like a little beckham on steroids.

I must admit the technology behind this is far from trivial. I really didn't think it would take that long to write a browser-based development environment. Sure. IE's crappy document object model didn't help. Neither did its poor JavaScript performance. As my brother once said "IE is so s#!tty you can write its optimizations in JavaScript". Well.. No point in finger pointing.

So, as promised - 7 things you didn't know you can do with your browser (and probably because you couldn't up untill now):

* Note: No desktops were harmed during the creation of this footage.

1. Edit *.csproj files I know. This looks exactly like Visual Studio. It's not. But you could download the project you created with it and open it in VS if you wanted to. 2. Compile C# Well yes, technically speaking this actually takes place in the server but still. You know what I mean. 3. Code You know...the good ol' fashioned way where the code gets colored and magically auto complete. I swear I am so hooked to this thing I find myself clicking CTRL+SPACE on gmail. That always leaves me disappointed somehow though. 4. Debug OK now this was HARD to achieve. I wont bore you with details but suffice to say we are now offically HTTP plumbers. 5. Profile This was actually not that hard once we got debugging right. JavaScript can be so nice if you just give it enough memory. 6. Deploy Ok this is cool. Amazon did a bang up job on EC2. You really should check them out if you want to stick it to your IT guys. 7. Sync databases with objects The cool thing about DLinq was the promise to finally be able to throw away that DDL cheat sheet. Somehow that really didn't happen until we wrote this one.

Whatever you may be thinking of it, it's too late not to try it out cause this thing is just too geeky for anyone to ignore. Go on. Give it a go. Don't be shy now.