Today, when building applications, web developers need to consider more browsers, platforms, devices, and form factors than ever before. Recent hardware advances, from mobile computing, touch interfaces and high resolution displays, to the ever shifting landscape of browser API’s and JavaScript libraries, have elevated the level of discipline required to be successful on the modern web. As such, the maturity of web development tooling has increased to aide developers, but a large gap still remains, and developing for the web platform is not as easy as it should be. It is my belief that Microsoft can make an impact in covering the gap.

I am proud to announce that Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Hoorn have joined the Visual Studio team.

 Anthony, Nik, Scott Hanselman, David Fowler & Phil Haack at the unveiling of Glimpse at Mix 11

Nik and Anthony are the creators of Glimpse, an open source web debugging and diagnostics tool they released at Microsoft’s own Mix conference in 2011. Since its creation, Glimpse has been used by thousands of ASP.NET developers to gain insight into the inner workings of their applications and to identify performance enhancement opportunities. Once installed via NuGet, Glimpse automatically enhances ASP.NET applications by providing an intuitive visual timeline of request execution, a log of SQL queries, URL route debugger and much more; all embedded directly into the web page. In addition, Glimpse is fully extensible. Create your own custom extensions, or download one of the many community build ones on the NuGet gallery. For more information about Glimpse and how to use it, be sure to check out the Getting Started documentation.

Glimpse’s Head-Up-Display view, rendered into a web application.

As full time Microsoft employees, Nik and Anthony will strive to narrow the tooling gap by continuing their quest to make the web a better place through performance, diagnostics, and debugging tooling. To do so, they will work closely with several existing teams across many aspects of the web platform as well as progress on Glimpse, which will remain an open source project.

In addition to the expertise and passion that Nik and Anthony bring to our team, I’m also excited about what this means for the future of Glimpse itself. The project has done quite well on its own, but will improve and grow even more with the help of Microsoft’s support and resources. I’m excited about the opportunity to contribute to Glimpse, and explore ways to make it a key part of the toolset for users of Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio Online. That said, Glimpse will maintain its meritocratic governance model, accepting community contributions and feedback.

Shanku Niyogi, General Manager, Visual Studio Team @shankuniyogi Shanku has been at Microsoft since 1998, and has spent most of that time on developer tools and runtimes. Shanku currently leads the Cross Platform and Open Tools group, which is responsible for the new cross-platform Visual Studio Code product, and a number of Microsoft’s other tools outside the Visual Studio IDE.