
Remote-Powered Developer Tools - pavanagrawal123
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/intelligent-productivity-and-collaboration-from-anywhere/
======
Titanous
It's worth noting that the new VS Code Remote Development extensions are not
open source, which means that it is impossible for the community to fix bugs,
and add new platforms/environments/features, or see the code that's running in
their environment without reverse engineering.

[https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/faq#_why-arent-
the...](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/faq#_why-arent-the-remote-
development-extensions-or-their-components-open-source)

~~~
Vinnl
Thanks for pointing that out.

(Also odd formulation of the question: "Why aren't the open soure? - We made
the decision to keep them closed source." The actual answer is to the next
question: "we may provide premium developer services.")

~~~
pytester
After embracing open source, they appear to now be extending it...

~~~
WalterGR
_After embracing open source, they appear to now be extending it..._

This is an add-on to Microsoft’s open source editor... Is your concern that
Microsoft has embraced VS Code, is now extending it, and has the sinister end
goal of exterminating VS Code?

~~~
hackerfromthefu
What happens is they extinguish the competing alternative open source
products, by taking mindshare and users from them.

Then once the alternatives are no longer so viable, they use their dominant
market share to their advantage and the detriment of users.

It's what google has done with Android, Chrome, Gmail.

~~~
WalterGR
_What happens is they extinguish the competing alternative open source
products, by taking mindshare and users from them._

Oh my.

That’s called “competition”.

You are mis-construing EEE.

------
noname120
This is an interesting development since there is already a multitude of
online IDE's that are based on Visual Studio Code:

\- StackBlitz: [https://stackblitz.com/](https://stackblitz.com/)

\- Theia: [https://www.theia-ide.org/](https://www.theia-ide.org/)

\- Coder: [https://coder.com/](https://coder.com/)

Overall, this is a prime example of one of the synergies that Microsoft was
able to create from the GitHub acquisition which was the missing puzzle piece.
Microsoft now has control over a complete software development pipeline: a
development platform (Windows), an IDE (vscode, vs), a code versioning host
(GitHub), continuous integration (Azure Pipeline), deployment (Azure).

If Microsoft can leverage its control over this complete chain to make the
whole experience integrated and effortless as it's doing with Visual Studio
Online here, it could well take over the market, especially in corporate
environments.

~~~
sytse
GitLab's web IDE is also based on a Visual Studio Code component, the Monaco
Editor [https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-
editor/](https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/)

The VS Code Remote Development extensions look nice too but are not open
source
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19841089](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19841089)

------
lostintangent
Hey all! I’m the author of this post, and lead the PM team at Microsoft behind
IntelliCode, Live Share, and the cloud-based remote development capabilities
described in this article. We’re looking forward to working with developers,
and learning how to further support teams who are looking to up-level their
productivity and embrace further workplace flexibility (yay for remote
development!). In the meantime, feel free to ask me anything!

~~~
core-questions
What's the situations going to be like for third-party addons for this? My
company has need of an online IDE for our end users to code against, and
obviously writing our own seems like too gargantuan of a task that will likely
result in sub-par outcomes.

Could we instead make some kind of first-class addon for VS Code Online, and
funnel users into setting that up instead?

~~~
lostintangent
Enabling the ecosystem is a big focus for us moving forward, so I’d love to
chat further about your scenario and requirements. Feel free to ping me at
joncart@microsoft.com and we can setup a quick call.

------
manishsharan
As an "oldtimer", I tried out AWS Cloud9 and other cloud based IDEs and came
away deeply unimpressed . However my frame of reference was to my experience
with my heavily customized IDEs.

However, my daughter's classroom uses only online IDEs. I think they got used
to this style of IDEs when they got started with Scratch programming in
elementary school. These kids are much more comfortable and productive on the
online IDEs than my generation. They also share a lot and are more socially
engaged while coding than I ever was.

So Kudos to all Cloud IDEs; I am not sure I will ever appreciate you but my
kids sure will .

~~~
teachrdan
Can I ask what city or school district your child goes to school in that they
have programming classes in elementary school?

~~~
manishsharan
Toronto Here is a summary : [https://sites.google.com/a/tdsb.on.ca/coding-in-
the-elementa...](https://sites.google.com/a/tdsb.on.ca/coding-in-the-
elementary-grades/tdsb-coding-continuum)

------
reificator
Not surprised given VSCode's legacy as Monaco.

Will be interesting to see how the (at least) two companies offering hosted
VSCode will respond.

[https://coder.com/](https://coder.com/)

[https://stackblitz.com/](https://stackblitz.com/)

(Used inline in the documentation for LitElement/Polymer: [https://lit-
element.polymer-project.org/](https://lit-element.polymer-project.org/))

------
dessant
But then they'll learn that I only debug with print statements.

~~~
lostintangent
That’s OK! That’s how _many_ devs do their debugging. We don’t want to change
your workflow, we just want to make it simpler to setup and accessible from
anywhere :)

------
jameslk
I can see more developers adopting a cloud-based IDE. There may be desktop
apps, which will be Electron or PWAs (if the APIs ever evolve enough), but the
environment will be fully remote. The benefit is all the set up will already
be done: the IDE will provide all the same code formatting, linting, dev
sandbox, environment configuration, debugging profiles. No set up of any
tooling to make this work. New employees can be more productive from day one.
If your environment gets fubar'd just reset it instead spending the day
unbreaking your machine. The company will be able to limit bike shedding by
having all the same formatting and linting rules pre-setup. Code interviews
will be easier to conduct.

It's already being done to a limited degree by companies such as repl.it. Once
it is customized per enterprise customer, that's when it will really take off.
Microsoft seems to be in a good position to lead that.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Once it is customized per enterprise customer, that's when it will really
> take off. Microsoft seems to be in a good position to lead that.

I think RedHat is way ahead on that front with Eclipse Che.

~~~
aidenn0
Has Eclipse gotten any better for languages not named "Java"? I tried it for a
while for C development (maybe 8 years ago?) and it was terrible. As in "I
don't even know where to start fixing this" terrible.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Has Eclipse gotten any better for languages not named "Java"?

I don't know, but Eclipse Che isn't Eclipse in the same way VS Code/Online
isn't Visual Studio.

------
metamet
The articles mentions this at the end, but Coder offers a remote VS Code
environment:

[https://coder.com/](https://coder.com/) [https://github.com/cdr/code-
server](https://github.com/cdr/code-server)

Anyone have experience with it?

~~~
pixelHD
I use it in our lab, and it works very well. However, there's no multi-user
support. So anyone who connects to the server gets served the editor with the
same workspace.

That being said, I think they have the multi-user support in the roadmap.

~~~
meysholdt
Interesting. You might want to try gitpod.io to have multi-user support.

------
tinyhouse
Haven't tried it but this seems useful. I know Google has something similar
they use a lot internally. I guess one common use case for this is when you
have code you need to run on a remote server but you want a nice development
experience like you're developing locally (sometimes I see developers open an
IDE on a remote server which is too slow). A better solution is working
locally and having all changes sync automatically to the remote server. (yes
yes I know, you can use vim or emacs...). If there are MS people here I'd be
interested to hear their thoughts on this.

~~~
lostintangent
Check out [https://aka.ms/vsfutures](https://aka.ms/vsfutures). In addition to
Visual Studio Online (the web companion editor), we’re also building tools to
allow developing against remote machines from Visual Studio and Visual Studio
Code as well. In the case of the desktop clients, editing would actually
happen locally, and synced with the remote environment. That way you have low
latency editing + multi-machine portability and anywhere access.

~~~
alexeldeib
Sorry, Visual Studio Online? AKA Azure DevOps a few months ago? Surprised
someone decided to pick the same name up that quickly. The name makes a lot
more sense applied to this team, though :)

n.b.: MS employee, interned under the org f.k.a VSO a few years ago.

------
elamje
Very nice - moves in this direction will give more developers the ability to
use lower-end computers like Chromebooks to do just about everything.

~~~
simias
Is the editor/IDE really the limitation? If anything web-technology-based IDEs
are usually the ones wasting resources nowadays, my long-lived emacs session
running the SLIME environment to interact with common lisp uses a meager (by
modern standards) 110MB of RAM. I used a very similar setup 15 years ago on a
computer with 512MB of RAM and a single-core 1.5GHz CPU.

You can already develop very comfortably on a chromebook if you're willing to
forsake the bloat of the web. Actually if I can trust Wikipedia a modern
Chromebook outperforms my main desktop machine a decade ago. Putting
everything in the cloud doesn't strike me as a great step forward, although it
could have its uses.

~~~
elamje
Well, you might be biased by the fact that you are fluent in emacs and/or vim.
90+% of modern programmers use heavier IDE's in their work.

------
ElatedOwl
I wonder if this will have Visual Studio's Go To Implementation feature. If
so, I really hope this gets fully integrated in Azure DevOps repos.

It's a great experience right now, but I pretty often end up pulling the
repository down just for Go To Implementation.

~~~
jullytta
Yes, it will. It's nice to see someone appreciates that feature (as the person
that spent 1 month making sure it worked well for the PR scenario).

------
headgasket
FWIW, I wrote a small script for remote dev called duplexrsync, love it so
far.
[https://github.com/francoisp/DuplexRsync](https://github.com/francoisp/DuplexRsync)
Haven’t tested on win10 yet but it should work, no language limitations and
it’s 150 lines of open source MIT bash. EDIT: il someone tests this on win10’s
Ubuntu sidecar thing before me, and if there’s a glitch besides the calls to
homebrew that can be made optional, please send a PR! Cheers and the peace be
with you!

------
kgwxd
Been using it every day at work for 4 years. Never even noticed the name
change to "Azure DevOps".

Has anyone here ever used an online IDE, for anything other than very small
tasks?

~~~
AshleyGrant
This is actually a new product using the old product name.

~~~
contextfree
Yes. The product/service now known as Azure DevOps was originally called the
Team Foundation Service, then Visual Studio Online, then Visual Studio Team
Services, and now it's Azure DevOps. This Visual Studio Online is a new
product/service.

~~~
AshleyGrant
One of these years they'll get the name right! I typically refer to it as
"Whatever they're calling VSTS this week"

------
Communitivity
Anyone know if there will be an on-premises option for this? I'd love to have
this but for various reasons we'd have to run it off our own servers.

~~~
Sephr
Seeing as Visual Studio Code was created with web technologies, this shouldn't
be too difficult for a motivated individual to recreate.

------
holtalanm
Just tried Live Share within VSCode the other day with a friend who lives in
Hawaii -- It worked flawlessly after I worked around the issues signing in.

~~~
lostintangent
I’m sooo glad to hear that! Don’t hesitate to let us know how we can improve
the product further, and also let us know if the direction we’re going
resonates with you.

~~~
ElCapitanMarkla
:+1: for live share from me too. It worked really well when we used it within
NZ and then back to the main office in the UK. It’s been really useful for
helping some of the guys back there

------
jpincheira
Remote work is here to stay, and love it when more companies and software
products join in and start contributing to making it easier to work this way.

~~~
lostintangent
Better enabling remote work is one of our team’s primary points of focus.
Between Live Share ([https://aka.ms/vsls-why](https://aka.ms/vsls-why)) and
these new remote development capabilities, we hope that we can contribute to
making things easier, productive and more enjoyable for everyone.

------
azhenley
I _think_ I used this as an intern at Microsoft in 2016. Can anyone at MS
confirm that this has been live internally for a few years?

I only ever used it to take a peek at repositories before cloning them
locally. It had a fair amount of navigation features builtin, like Go To
Declaration, but was not a Visual Studio replacement (like the article says).

~~~
hirsin
No - you're thinking the other Visual Studio Online which is now called Azure
DevOps. It's "just" a source repository explorer with CI functionality.

~~~
azhenley
Good to know, thank you! Too many products named Visual Studio :)

------
GordonS
I guess this explains why they renamed the previous Visual Studio Online to
Azure DevOps...

------
daviding
On trying to connect my Win10 VSCode Insiders build using this to a MacOS it
says "Can't connect to mac: unreachable or not Linux x86_64 (Darwin x86_64)".

Is this limited to only Linux and MacOS being the host via OpenSSH here?

~~~
mattbierner
Yes, at the moment only Linux is supported for the server. But please upvote
the relevant issues so we know which other platforms people are most
interested in running Code server on: [https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-
remote-release/issues/24](https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-remote-
release/issues/24)

~~~
daviding
Thanks for the info - I think I would personally be much more interested in
trying out VSCode as my main editor if I knew I could also SSH Remote to MacOS
as well as Docker containers and the like.

------
sdegutis
I think there's a typo, I think "Not that long ago, Visual Studio Code was
Microsoft’s hub for all things DevOps, before DevOps was a buzzword." is meant
to say "Visual Studio Online".

------
burtonator
Is this literally the same code that runs in the main Electron app just on the
server?

I assume about 20% of it is going to have to be custom of course but still ..
re-using a lot of the same code on the desktop is nice.

~~~
lostintangent
Yep! We want the experience between the web and desktop to feel cohesive and
immediately familiar (not to mention extension interop). So it only made sense
to share as much of the code as possible, to ensure we can provide the best
developer experience!

------
krispbyte
Will this only work on Chromium since VSCode/Electrum are based on it?

~~~
naikrovek
"any device with a web browser" is what they said.

~~~
cush
Scott Hanselman demoed it on an iPad Pro, so iOS Safari is definitely covered.

------
kevin_b_er
What's the license on this tool for anyone who's in the preview? Such things
can often contain ugly things about irrevocable worldwide licenses to do as
the host pleases.

------
geokon
the next step is ofcourse running an IDE remotely from a running program
itself that can self modify. Like Nightlight for
Clojure:[https://github.com/oakes/Nightlight](https://github.com/oakes/Nightlight)

my dream would be basically nightlight, but if the ide itself could self
modify kinda like Emacs. Basically Emacs in Clojure that you could embed in
applications or have applications run from it (the two would be equivalent)

------
ralusek
What is Microsoft's motivation for putting so much effort into VSCode? I don't
understand the business of this particular product, and it makes me kind of
uneasy.

~~~
farisjarrah
A) Visual Studio Code is OSS, so anyone can come help microsoft improve it,
which in turn helps out their commercial Visual Studio Project

B) Gaining developer mindshare is very powerful. If you want another example
of how powerful this is, just look at the dominance of Windows XP and Windows
7 in the developer market, which in turn, made a huge proliferation of
software available for the windows eco system. They are basically getting
developers to dogfood the OS and developer tools for them.

3) Microsoft can learn from how people use visual code and make the developer
experience overall much more pleasant for their azure integrations. You get
enough developers telling the C-Suite how awesome Azure is, pretty soon you
are going to have companies switching off AWS to Azure because "it integrates
so well with all the developer tooling I am already using"(<\--- Which would
be VS Code.)

~~~
jullytta
VSCode was also born cross-platform, which enables developers that didn't
consider Visual Studio.

------
jo-wol
So now you can't disable their "analytics".

------
kumarharsh
So... where does that leave CodeSandbox / StackBlitz?

------
nik736
Is there any way to run Atom in a browser?

I know this question sounds silly since it's basically a browser, but that it
actually is similar to c9.

~~~
reificator
Serious question: Why prefer Atom over VSCode?

From my evaluations early on in both they seemed like the same thing but
VSCode had more features _(esp. built-in terminal)_ and performed
significantly better.

I'm sure that there's been a lot of progress in the years since, but I haven't
kept up.

I could see not trusting Microsoft with an open source project, but now that
they own Github they have two open source Electron-based code editors, and I
can't imagine that's going to last for long. So really I'd be more concerned
for the long term health of Atom than VSCode.

~~~
nik736
Good question!

I prefer Atom because I use it since the early days and I am so used to it.
The whole workflow is super awesome and everything is simple and clean. I
don't have any performance problems nowadays (this was a big problem years
ago) so I have zero complaints.

It's hard to switch, I tried VSCode, don't like it and have no reason to
switch because _for me_ Atom just works and I love it.

~~~
reificator
I totally understand not wanting to switch. Just curious if there was anything
cool I was missing out on.

Glad to hear the performance now is better now than it was back then!

------
brian_herman__
Nice! This already kicks Cloud9's butt.

------
bobblywobbles
What benefits does this provide to flat-out installing VSCode? I'm not seeing
any here..

~~~
codingdave
The article said that it wasn't intended to replace VS Code... it was more for
quick edits or reviews, for example if you aren't on your main dev machine.

~~~
lostintangent
Yep that’s correct. We’re making the desktop clients remote-capable, and the
providing the web editor as a “companion” experience. We want to enable devs
to use the right tool for the right job.

------
partiallypro
This has more or less been available for Azure Web Apps for a while now, it
works great

------
christianmm
Similar to gitpod.io but that one is faster to spin up, at least for OSS

------
mpweiher
So basically, you can run Visual Studio Code in the browser you already have
instead of installing a private browser to run it in?

------
pavanagrawal123
This might be a better link with more info (source):
[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/intelligent-
prod...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/intelligent-productivity-
and-collaboration-from-anywhere/)

~~~
lostintangent
Thanks for the link! That post explains the broader context of work that our
team is working on to improve developer productivity moving forward.

~~~
pavanagrawal123
Of course! I love the work the VS team is doing inside of MS Would like to see
things like this, remote code, etc. open sourced though :)

------
RockmanX
good! now they will have my code

~~~
juandazapata
If you use Github, they already do.

------
airstrike
RIP CodeAnywhere

[http://codeanywhere.com](http://codeanywhere.com)

~~~
ivan_burazin
I really don't think this will kill us :) Nothing has yet, and we have never
been stronger. But thanks!

