I have not visited any Microsoft property for some time now and I have this strange feeling about the UX. Sadly I can not say if it is my deeply rooted aversion against everything Microsoft or if the UX is really odd.
Hi dandare. I am a dev on Azure Notebooks at Microsoft and can tell you that our team also delivers Python Tools for Visual Studio, Azure SDK for Python, R Tools for Visual Studio, and previously Node.js Tools for Visual Studio.
The UX was not done in any way to feel like something else. We tried to design something that worked well for Jupyter users as well as looked nice and was usable.
That being said, our teams strengths are not in UX by far. We are starting to work with designers to improve the "dev-UI"" we currently have.
If you have any more feedback you would like to share we would love to hear it. There is a public tracker at https://github.com/microsoft/azurenotebooks and an email that goes to the team at nbhelp@microsoft.com
As chupapuma said, we aren't UI folks and all feedback is welcome. We hope to update it gradually in the coming year :). The original UI was done by one of our summer interns. [EDIT] didn't want to make it sound like I'm blaming our intern - he was awesome, especially if you'd seen the previous rev!
I think your impressions of Microsoft are out-of-date. We've been successfully using Azure resources through "Azure for Research" grants. My world, is the world of Linux VMs, Docker, and OSS and I find Azure to be a good fit for our research needs. (I never touch any Windows OS, if that's what you are worried about.)
I was in a similar situation a short time ago. Although I found it required a lot of screen space to work well, it could be a little slow, and it took some getting used to, it really grew on me. The hierarchical drill-down was really nice once you had a lot of different types of resources. I like AWS' interface, but sometimes I miss the feel of that navigation...
It took me 55 seconds to load the page (42 of which went into downloading a 6 MB large GIF). 40+ requests. And it doesn't seem like a slow Internet problem at all.
