TouchDevelop: A touch-first IDE for the Web created with TypeScript

Last week a student at the University of York asked me about my views on typescript.

So what is Typescript

Typescript is a new JavaScript development environment, its been designed to help developers write more complex apps with the popular scripting language.

TypeScript is free, open source and compiles into JavaScript, additionally Typescript will run on any browser, host or operating system.

TypeScript is also extending JavaScript developers, by allowing enterprise tools to build large-scale apps around HTML 5 in the browser and on mobile devices. Apps for the Windows 8.

Microsoft Technical Fellow Anders Hejlsberg states that. TypeScript is designed to add those extra bits, with static typing and classes at the top of Hejlsberg's list of developer desirables.

Existing JavaScript code and libraries work in TypeScript, and it also support for Emacs, Vim and Sublime Text. A TypeScript editor plugin for Visual Studio 2012 has also been released. Code samples are already available, too.

So how is Typescript being used, TouchDevelop is a novel, touch-first IDE originally written as a Windows Phone 7 app using C# and XAML.

TouchDevelop lets you create WP7, Win8 and Web-apps directly on your phone, tablet, or desktop. Trying to build the JavaScript version, both for Win8 and the Web, we were frustrated by the complete lack of compile-time checking. We thus got very excited to be one of the very early adopters of TypeScript, a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to idiomatic JavaScript.

For more details on Touch Develop Development see the following //build session.   https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/3-018 

Typescript site https://www.typescriptlang.org/