Surface Pro 3

[wild_bill]

Has anyone used a surface pro 3? I'm looking at the i5 version. Will it be able to run Visual Studio, SSMS, etc.?

[dilettante]

No reason to think it can't do this. The question is, "How well?"

The main issues will be the tiny screen, tiny keyboard, mouse substitute, and the small size and short life in general of SSDs which are not intended to hold up to heavy write cycles.

Think of it as an awkward version of a PC, like a laptop, but worse.

Yeah, you can plug in a ton of decent hardware and sort of use it, but it will never be as productive as a normal desktop PC.

[jmcilhinney]

Undoubtedly it will be able to run those applications. A Surface Pro 3 is a fully-fledged PC in a tablet form factor. Performance will not be an issue. That said, usability may be. I think that dilettante may be labouring the point a little more than it deserves but it is true that it may be like using a mid- to low-end laptop in some regards. The Type Cover is pretty good but not really as good as a good laptop keyboard and trackpad. I think that you can get a better docking station that improves the experience if you want to pay for it. In short, performance will be fine but usability may be a bit of an issue for some people in the default configuration.

[wild_bill]

Thanks for the input guys. I travel quite a bit, so I thought it may be handy to have something light.

[dilettante]

Tablet tablet technology has pushed into laptop design in recent years.

If you shop around you might be able to find a decent lightweight laptop now in the same price range or lower, one with a far more useful screen size and keyboard and perhaps even a better CPU and more reliable storage.

Think hard before relying on an SSD in a machine used for real work. They do best when used as read-only as possible.

[Lord Orwell]

its true. If money isn't an issue it would be a decent system. If it is an issue, you can get a more powerful standard notebook form factor for less cost. "desktop replacement" laptops by ibm may be heavy but they offer things most laptops don't. One of mine has an rfid reader on it to log in with! Crazy. It also has a hot-swap drive bay and an available docking station that takes a pci expansion card (and yes you can put some video cards in it).

[Lord Orwell]

i forgot to mention: depending on the developing you are doing, it may NOT do what you want. For example to develop for windows phone 8.1 you are required to have a 64-bit OS and the emulators for windows phone 8 require virtualization support in the bios.