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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

A great idea but it exposes a lot of rough edges in Azure:

1. The Microsoft Remote Desktop Mac app is a UI trainwreck – not just wasted space and odd keyboard shortcuts but things like the Azure login process disabling password managers and the one-time auth code via SMS service never arriving.

2. Azure's federated Live.com logins are broken, cycling between the login page and the console hitting you with a “You have logged out elsewhere”

3. In US East, US West, Southeast Asia and East Asia, connections hang (20+ minutes) at “Please wait for the User Profile Service”

I'm really looking forward to trying this service when Azure is more stable and, hopefully, they add older versions of IE.

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Hi acdha, 1. You can go to http://feedback.azure.com/forums/247748-azure-remoteapp and share your feedback with the Remote App team. They really want to make it as useful as possible and it is still on Preview so now is the moment to influence the team 3. Yes, we are working on it and should be fixed soon. Regarding the older versions of IE, unfortunately we are running on top of Server 2012 so we are locked to IE11+. At this moment you can use the dev tools and change the compat mode and we are thinking about adding Enterprise Mode to the service so you can test on "IE8".

Actually Server 2012 R1 uses IE10.

Azure uses R2, which comes with IE11.

Are bugs related to Remote Desktop performance best reported against the client or Remote App? It doesn't appear to support bitblts so simply moving a window is extremely jerky and things like CSS transitions are basically a slideshow.

Enterprise Mode would be useful since that's getting a bit of traction as an alternative to staying mired in IE8.

There is no GPU acceleration. When running IE through RDP we default to software rendering and unfortunately there isn't anything we can do about that :(

Not even old-school acceleration like we used to have in the 90s? I thought RDP used to at least support things like "move this rectangle to a new position" for the performance win over things like VNC.

>The Microsoft Remote Desktop Mac app is a UI trainwreck

agreed. That's why I'm always using CoRD (http://cord.sourceforge.net) for any kind of RDP use on the mac (I don't know whether it would work with this remote IE thing, but for sysadmining here and then, CoRD > Remote Desktop any day)

Also major issues off the top of my head:

Azure VM instances that run in a VPN have major network issues that are caused by the MS infrastructure.

Depending on the latency you won't get the 'feel' for many websites, important nowadays with CSS transitions and WebGL.

MSIE is circling the train in terms of marketshare. The VMs MS provided for testing were a godsend, but forcing devs to give up their work flow would likely result in them just dropping MSIE support.

FYI: it's "circling the drain"

I think "circling the train" is more witty; it paints a great picture of a stereotypical American wild-west film, with American Indians circling a train whilst shooting rifles in a haphazard manner whilst shouting and yelping.

Or perhaps bandits doing the same thing.

In any case, a large collection of bespectacled Microsoft employees circling a train on horses whilst still wearing 1980s software developer outfits (shirts with pinstripes in them but white collars, high-waisted ironed trousers with a slim gold belt buckle, and big glasses, and a bushy moustache) in all the dirt would be witty, whilst dragging green-screen CRTs and big 5.25" floppy discs in their saddle bags with great difficulty.

I know, I know, this is terribly stereotypical but I think it would make for a great film in the style of Mel Brooks; you can contact me if you want obscure and off-the-wall film settings like this...

If that is important to you we have also made available all versions of IE in Virtual Machines at https://www.modern.ie

And, if you frequently use IE virtual machines, you can use the ievms[1] script to manage the downloads, expiration times, etc. Saves a ton of bandwidth and disk space over the modern.ie downloads, too (it uses the modern.ie images as base installs).

[1] https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

Does any or all older version of IE run in wine in linux? would that be better solution than download tons of 7gb VMs just to test IE?

Edit: never mind, found answer here http://askubuntu.com/questions/190425/how-to-install-interne...

what a nightmare!!! It is simpler to just detect IE user and ask them to switch to ff or chrome.

It used to be quite simple with IEs4Linux[1], but it only supports IE 5, 5.5, 6 and sort of 7. Not as useful nowadays.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEs4Linux

This sounds a lot like the issues I had a little over a year ago. Most of the issues didn't seem to be related to Azure itself, but instead to the logging in and account management experience. It's a shame, login should be a solved issue at this point, but very few people get it right.

I don't want yet another email address to use a service, Flickr having required a Yahoo.com email address is a prime example, as is Azure.

Microsoft accounts work with any email. Mine has always been my Gmail address, works fine. I think the reason people think you need an outlook or hotmail address is because of the example prompt text on account sign up.

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