Back in 2011 at Microsoft’s Mix conference, Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Hoorn created a program called Glimpse. Little did they know that four years later, Microsoft would be hiring them to join the Visual Studio team according to a new blog post.
The Mix conferences were conceived in 2005 as a way for Microsoft to engage with the web community. However, in 2012, Microsoft merged the conference in to the more general BUILD developer conference. The reasons for doing so were to bring all developers under the one roof.
Glimpse is a free open source diagnostic tool that allows a developer to “glimpse” behind the scenes at vital information of a web page in real time. For example, if you visit a web site, a handy toolbar at the bottom of the page will display how long it took to load. Used by thousands of ASP .Net developers, the tool provides intuitive timelines of the performance of a web page. The tool can also handle extensions many of which have been created by a large community. For a brief overview of Glimpse, check out the video below.
The hiring of the two developers doesn’t mean the end of Glimpse. Quite the opposite in fact. Under Microsoft’s stewardship, they will still work on the tool while also striving to find new and improved ways to aid web developers. Glimpse will remain open source and will become more integrated in to Visual Studio according to General Manager of the Visual Studio team, Shanku Niyogi.
The fact that Microsoft is investing more resources in to improving the life of a developer bodes well for the future. It’s unknown when developers will see Glimpse integrated in to Visual Studio, but we hope it will be in the next version which is due for release very soon.