My only gripe - VS is way too expensive, for my pocket at least. And you need VS to program in TS, Intellisense is that good. Sure, you can go with Express edition but then you don't have node.js extension - which kinda make the whole endeavour bit pointless (again, for me at least).
Wish they would bring prices to the level of, for example, those of Jetbrains, or made node.js extension working with Express.
Microsoft says TS is supported in Visual Studio Express 2013 for Web. That's a free download with a license that allows one to do commercial development. It won't have everything the pay versions have, but it will be more than enough for TS development.
You don't need VS for TS. Eclipse and WebStorm support it pretty well. I've evaluated Visual Studio, Eclipse and WebStorm, and Eclipse and WebStorm are better for TypeScript development, at least if you're using Node.js.
In my experience, Typescript support in IntelliJ/Webstorm has always been sketchy --- so much that I find it quite unfair that they would mention this as a feature of the paying version.
I still use it, but I often get invalid highlighting, etc.. Then I update to the latest EAP because it's supposed to fix this particular issue... and then other appear. Hmm, annoying...
I tried the VS version as well, and there the highlighting and refactoring works very well... but the editor is waaaay slower so I always give up. Funny because it works fine when working with other languages such as C#.
I tried WebStorm and found their support for TS severly lacking, IIRC it was limited to automatic compilation and basic syntax detecting. Code understanding/static type analysis was basically non-existent, e.g. it wasn't checking if argument conforms the interface described in the method's definition - you had to compile the script to find that out.
and I think there are other options if you contact someone at your local Microsoft office.
I've just started using BizSpark (for a side project with 2 friends, so the "startup" term is a bit loose), and it's a great program.
It's still way too expensive, but their goal is to let you give it a try, and if your startup is doing well you won't mind paying U$ 10.000 or whatever if you're cashing millions :)
On the other hand you do have companies that do make millions that are bailing on certain aspects of Microsoft tools and servers due licensing costs and increases. I've been involved in IT budgeting for almost two decades and the CFOs don't always sign the check just because it's an IBM/Microsoft/Oracle solution.
Ultimately, when it comes to business, one of the biggest reasons to spend money is to buy yourself time. You probably could build an entire product yourself, but if you hired a few developers at $100K/year, you could build the product way faster. If you had new systems at $3K each (instead of buying used laptops from five years ago for $99 each), development would speed up. If you spent $2K/year on a third-party software suite, you wouldn't need to build it yourself or mess around with something not quite so polished. The flip side is that if spending money on something doesn't get you any benefit then of course you shouldn't do it.
Some people see benefits, and some don't. But making comparisons to narcotics comes across as quite childish.
Cost of Visual Studio Pro + MSDN for my (small) business was £1100. This for 2 years of MSDN, and it was some deal (at the reseller's suggestion) that also came with various Windows licences too. (More Windows 7 than I imagined was likely for the price, and I think Windows XP and Windows Server 2008 R2 too.) Renewal cost is something like £900.
I wouldn't refuse something cheaper, but the price seemed fair enough as these things go. For a side project this is perhaps a little steep, and if you could realistically use something cheaper you would be silly not to, but for a business with an actual need for all this Microsoft junk this seems like reasonable value.
Stuff that costs me less than £~500/yr: printer paper.
Stuff that costs me more than £~500/yr: everything else.
Then again, just to back up your point - my last employer switched everybody from MS Office to OpenOffice to avoid the licensing fees, even though numerous internal tools (that then had to be rewritten, at a cost of several man-weeks, plus drag due to changes in workflow for the less technical staff that used them) relied on VBA, COM and OLE stuff that OpenOffice didn't support. And the place I'm currently working with doesn't install Visual Studio on the servers (each server = 6-core Core i7 with 32GB RAM, 2TB RAID1, 1TB SSD) because apparently it would be too costly to do that. So maybe once you become big enough for MS to care about things start to become rather more expensive.
I tried making the software cost for my side projects $0, and the non-Microsoft community does make it feasible, but I'm way too invested in Microsoft tools, so the productivity hit was way too steep.
I started with a stack of Grails + PostgreSQL, hosted on AWS (Elastic Beanstalk, etc.), it worked pretty nicely (I was particularly impressed with the ease of use of Elastic Beanstalk for an absolute newbie).
What I need is some free time, or a job switch (working on the 2nd part :) ).
Still, I tried most IDEs and other ways of development (Eclipse, IntelliJ, Sublime Text), and I still like Visual Studio the most. I also like Microsoft SQL Server a lot.
The Microsoft stack is certainly a lot more expensive than an equivalent stack if you have to pay for it, but having the BizSpark option, it makes a lot of sense if you come from a Microsoft background.
I've never been in the situation to make these kinds of decisions, but when you're paying tens of thousands a year per developer, sysadmin, qa, and/or ops people, a couple thousands per in software costs isn't going to break the bank.
Hmm technically you don't need an IDE to make good use of Typescript. It works very well as a standalone compiler installed using npm, and you get static type checking etc. which is really the point of Typescript IMHO --- if you don't care for static typing you might as well use JS directly.
Sure, once you've got this you might as well want good auto-completion, refactorings, etc, but this also applies to any language that's not bound to one specific IDE (C++, for example, or Java).
500 dollars for pro is extremely reasonable in my opinion, considering the value it brings. Another 150 for a personal ReSharper license and you're ready to tackle anything.
I think this is more directed at C# users. The focus of TS is to let tooling (specifically Visual Studio) do the same stuff it does in C#. They tried and failed to make VS good for JS.
VS 2013 is actually very nice for Javascript development. The only place it really falls down still is management for pure JS projects. SublimeText still beats it there for grouping JS files together just by folder instead of Visual Studio's need for clunky "solution" and "project" files.
Well, even if it's directed at C# by Microsoft, it's used by a lot of people that are not into Visual Studio or Microsoft. TypeScript is a lot more than "IDE tooling", even though proper intellisense makes it a lot of nicer to develop.
It's not like Microsoft somehow failed to make VS good for JS, it's theoretically impossible to make VS do to JS what TS can do for any IDE.
I haven't seen any Papuan, ever. Doesn't mean they don't exist.
As a side project, I'm creating a framework to build Gjs applications using TypeScript. The neat thing is that the compiler can easily create a combined JavaScript file, which when appended to a stub JS file results in a single executable for installation. The bad part is that the supplied lib.d.ts contains definitions for objects that don't exist.
I love VS for javascript. With ReSharper installed it is great. I guess maybe I answered my own question by admitting I need a JetBrains tool in there but: What tool is so great for Javascript?
I use Sublime a lot as well on my Mac, and I don't like it as well.
My sibling comments (at time of post) point out Chrome/Firefox dev tools and jshint.. Which I also use every day integrated into the same development flow. Perhaps the question is better posed as "What IDE is so great for Javascript?"
FWIW I use VS2012 for Javascript development daily. I also add in ReSharper, the wonderful Web Essentials extension (http://vswebessentials.com/) and a few other extensions I adore ('Productivity Power Tools 2012' and 'Highlight all occurrences of a selected word'). I find the result to be exceptionally good.
I agree, never had any disappointment with them. Some may think I'm exaggerating but what I see is they are contributing to Visual Studio's success more than Microsoft.
Exactly, with 1 or 2% of the market using TS the only reason to not use vanilla JS is because it is to complicated for you and you want to replicate a C# experience. That's a shame because you loose a lot of the advantages of pure JS.
And, if you want to use an IDE over say vim or Notepads, then Webstorm is the best.
