Visual Studio Apache Cordova Tooling preview

This is actually kinda awsome. I had a terrible experince some months back trying to get a Cordova app made for Android&#x2F;iOS to work on Win8. As a result of the special javascript rules in Win8, not event the Angular source was possible to run without encapsulation all &quot;insertBefore&quot; in jQuery-lite in &quot;MSApp.execUnsafeLocalFunction&quot;.<p>Together with the toolkit they are even providing example ToDo-apps for Angular, Backbone and WinJs which makes me hope all the issues I struggled with is now fixed.(Possible by running the app inside a webview instead as an native WinJS app).

I use MS VS 2013 on a daily basis at work and on my own personal projects. This is indeed good news. MS is, without a doubt, moving in the right direction.

This is awesome on multiple levels, but mainly it unchains the &quot;cloud&quot; from Cross Platform app development. Everything but vanilla Apache Cordova (Intel App Framework &#x2F; AppMobi, PhoneGap, Xamrian) insist on compiling your code on their servers. The effect is they take away a lot of control from the programmer.<p>If you insist on plain old Cordova, you end up with a text editor (Notepad++), with a cmd.exe window (for cordova&#x2F; node.js) and Chrome (for ripple, the Debug env). It will be really nice to get all of this into an IDE.

Very cool to see MS joining the Cordova bandwagon.