How would I develop apps if I had a Cloud Only PC?
I’m looking at the Acer-AC700-1099-Chromebook-Wi-Fi on Amazon.
The idea is kind of neat, and I can see this being the way more PCs are going to go. Nothing installed on your PC – you are basically running a “dumb terminal” that lives off an Internet connection.
So far, the biggest concern has been that apps like PhotoShop can not be run on them.
As programmers, most of us don’t care about PhotoShop, but we need to compile our C#!
Does anyone have any information on whether some form of Cloud Compiling is in the works?
Maybe my employer would be able to purchase an X-License copy of Visual Studio that is installed on the server and I’d just log into that to develop all of my apps.
This is totally doable. I would suggest that you/your employer take a look at XenDesktop. This is technology that lets you run Windows Virtual Machines in your own private cloud. Then to access these machines you run a “thin client” which is basically like a Remote Desktop session. The thin client can run on a normal laptop, an iPad, and even Google ChromeOS. The basics of this technology are free, and not that hard to setup.
See these articles here which are Citrix announcing support for ChromeOS.
http://www.citrix.com/English/NE/news/news.asp?newsID=2311983
http://lazure2.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/chromebook-box-with-citrix-receiver-going-against-microsoft/
The coolest part about this, is you are using a Chromebook which is a cloud only laptop to access the public cloud AND your own private cloud. Pretty cloudy in here 🙂