Can I develop Ionic using Windows and my IDE of choice?

I’m trying to get my head around Ionic. Obviously I like the idea of writing cross platform HTML mobile apps.
In the blog “Where does the Ionic Framework fit in?” it says that I should compare it to Twitter Bootstrap. Perfect… I like that!

Then I read the getting started, and everything is Mac, Node, Glup and what have you. That’s also perfect… just not for me :wink:

I want to be able to use my IDE of choice… which happens to be Visual Studio on Windows, with access to all the great tools I know and love. E.g. live updates with 2 way communication between IDE and browser, best of breed IntelliSense on JavaScript and angular directives, ReSharper for code navigation/refactoring/formatting/cleanup. But most importantly… I want my code in the same solution as my backend code, for easy refactoring across backend and frontend code.

So the question is… will I be able to get Ionic running perfectly with my tools, or am I trying to twist the framework in a way, that will only get me into trouble? Or where I’ll lose access to the upcoming improvements to Ionic?

I’m aware that creating an iOS app there is no way around having a Mac to create the signing certificates, provisioning profiles etc. But that’s a one-time thing, and then I can use PhoneGap Build or Telerik’s AppBuilder.

If you are right in comparing Ionic to Bootstrap, it should work on any platform because it’s just a JS and CSS, but I get the feeling that Ionic is more than that!

In other words: what parts of Ionic is dependent on anything but HTML, CSS and JS in the www folder?

I’m currently doing exactly that. I’m using Visual Studio as my IDE and I have the website for my Ionic app as part of that solution for which my API is included. I do testing inside of chrome launched from Visual Studio. I also use Visual Studio to commit my code changed to my TFS server using GIT. The only thing I don’t have down yet is the the transfer to my mac for deployment to an iPhone. Doing that is a manual pain right now.

In other words: what parts of Ionic is dependent on anything but HTML, CSS and JS in the www folder?

Nothing really. Just can’t do any testing with Cordova plugins without a device to test on for the most part.