
Microsoft’s web-based version of Visual Studio - _davebennett
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/04/you-can-now-try-microsofts-web-based-version-of-visual-studio/
======
manigandham
Techcrunch article is crummy, just click to the official page or read the big
discussion from yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442088)

Summary: " _Visual Studio Online provides cloud-powered development
environments for any activity - whether it 's a long-term project, or a short-
term task like reviewing a pull request. You can work with these environments
from Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio (sign up for the Private Preview), or a
browser-based editor that's accessible anywhere! You can even connect your own
self-hosted environments to Visual Studio Online at no cost._"

~~~
impalallama
I was hoping for some first hand impressions from it but no, its basically
just a re-hosted press announcement.

------
IGotThroughIt
I'll admit this, I was wrong about Satya. I didn't think Microsoft was
salvageable but he's been doing a stellar job. He's a great CEO and embracing
open source was a really good move.

I shifted to VSCode from atom (before they purchased github) due to atom's
memory hogging issues a while back. Haven't regretted the choice. For my
private repos, I used to only use the free version of bitbucket but Microsoft
introduced free private repos to github so I've been trying that out lately.
If I like it, I'll stick with it.

Also, all my code is hosted on Azure now from AWS since late last year.

I tried WSL but didn't like it to due problems with paths but at this rate
with which they're moving, it too might improve and I might find myself using
only Microsoft for my work. Would not have predicted that if you asked me a
few years back when I couldn't run away from Ms/Windows environment fast
enough.

~~~
CivBase
> I shifted to VSCode from atom (before they purchased github)

It just hit me that since GitHub was bought, both VSCode and Atom are owned by
Microsoft.

And somehow Windows still doesn't ship with a decent text editor out of the
box...

~~~
Someone1234
> And somehow Windows still doesn't ship with a decent text editor out of the
> box...

What would that look like? I mean a decent text editor is contextual. Are we
talking about Wordpad upgrades for office usage, a lightweight code editor, or
something else?

Plus don't people constantly criticize Microsoft for bloat/adding stuff to the
base OS? Now they want Microsoft to ship Windows 10 with e.g. VSCode out of
the box?

~~~
Ididntdothis
Something like Notepad++. VSCode is too heavy. It’s a real pain to edit text
and configure files with Notepad in environments where you can’t install
additional editors.

~~~
sedatk
Notepad++ is unnecessarily complicated for end users. It’s not only developers
who use Windows.

~~~
vbezhenar
Having developer tools preinstalled is awesome. When you can launch editor,
write some HTML/CSS/JavaScript with proper highlighting, launch it in browser,
it greatly reduces gap to start programming and it'll increase number of
people who're doing that. Those days I think preinstalling python would be
very useful. And that python will be much more valuable than 90% of junk
shipped with OS. It's only 25 MB. Sure, it's not about professional-level IDEs
but it's not required for useful work. Now typing programming code in
notepad.exe is what's terrible.

~~~
jhoechtl
Back in the DOS days Microsoft shiped with a decent editor and a programming
environment, alas from DOS 5 onwards.

~~~
Ididntdothis
Was that EDLIN? I have some very vague memories

~~~
WorldMaker
No one liked EDLIN.

I assumed the poster meant EDIT.COM and QBASIC. I'd also argue that Notepad
has about as much editing capability as EDIT.COM, even if nostalgia does seem
to want to color EDIT.COM as a more capable IDE than it really was simply
because I too spent a lot of time building dumb apps in QBASIC.

------
StanAngeloff
I want to like this, but having no support for Firefox, no SLA during the
preview[1] & being unable to figure out the pricing model[2] makes that very
difficult.

[1] How safe are my projects and what guarantees do I get that my work won't
be lost?

[2] _For cloud-hosted environments, each environment instance is billed based
on the number of consumed “environment units”, which are calculated according
to an environment’s instance size, the total time the environment is active
(i.e. a user is connected to it via the browser-based editor or via a client
such as Visual Studio Code) and the total lifetime of the environment (base
units)._

~~~
tasogare
> Full-time development Standard €42.39 per month

So, 2 years of developpement cost the price of a nice laptop, which you need
anyway to access the cloud.

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/visual-
stu...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/visual-studio-
online/)

~~~
StanAngeloff
I, oddly, see a different pricing structure on that page. Full-time
development Standard €55.10. This is assuming 100 active hours. "Active" being
defined as _" a user is connected […] via the browser-based editor"_. If I log
in at 9AM and log out at 5PM every day for an average of 20 working days each
month, I'd probably run ~€90 a month on the standard instance (and
considerably more on the Premium instance). My current laptop cost around €1,
200 and I can easily provision a new one at any time using an Ansible
playbook[1].

I am most definitely __not __the target audience of VS Online, which is
perfectly fine. Someone out there needs this for it to have been built by MS.

[1]:
[https://github.com/StanAngeloff/longitude](https://github.com/StanAngeloff/longitude)

~~~
icebraining
> I, oddly, see a different pricing structure on that page. Full-time
> development Standard €55.10.

Different regions have different prices, parent selected East US.

------
devtanna
I wanted to try this as the possibilities could be quite cool but got
discouraged after seeing it is a monthly service. Tired of everything turning
into a service that you pay for. Rather just carry my laptop.

~~~
skohan
Exactly. The SAAS model for creative software only benefits the service
provider. Modern laptop CPUs are _really_ fast - there's no non-business
reason to outsource my IDE workloads to a datacenter.

~~~
dogma1138
I don’t think individual developers is the target audience for this.

This might be an excellent solutions for companies that hire remote
contractors, no need to provide VDI or VPN access which requires you to open
your network more than this.

This + Office 365 means that you can grant easy and extremely restricted
access to external entities to deliver code and work collaboratively with your
internal teams.

------
seanwilson
I think people are missing the point that these cloud IDEs mean you don't need
to be nearby or carry around a powerful + expensive laptop to work.

You could travel with a cheap throwaway Chromebook and know you can still get
work done. If it gets stolen or lost, you can get a replacement the same day
and get back to work.

I've been in situations where I've travelled to some place where I don't want
to bring my expensive work laptop (e.g. want to travel light, the weather is
awful, it's a sketchy area), and had my work laptop break randomly a couple of
days before a big deadline where I couldn't wait for it to get repaired.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> I think people are missing the point that these cloud IDEs mean you don't
> need to be nearby or carry around a powerful + expensive laptop to work.

You already don't need to do this! Just RDP into your workstation. Christ,
we've been doing it since the 90s people!

~~~
jakear
RDP will require much higher bandwidth and come with much greater latency as
compared to VSO.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
My company has people doing work through web apps that they access using RDP
to a VM here at corporate because there internet is bad and it is faster and
more responsive that way.

~~~
jakear
I’ve used both VSCode over RDP and VSO and in my experience VSO is smoother.

------
TheRealDunkirk
"I don't get it." </Tom Hanks, in Big>

There's no stack I work in for which a single program is enough to get things
done, even if it's a giant, bloated IDE like Visual Studio, IntelliJ, or
RubyMine. When I need to operate on the outputs of the IDE, how am I supposed
to use my other tools with those files, when they're locked up in a cloud
service without a filesystem? Maybe this works for a pull-request review and
merge, but I can't see it being useful for any more than that.

~~~
neogodless
Could you expand upon your tools and workflow a bit?

It's not that I disagree with you, at least not for your use cases! But it's
not hard for me to think of cases where this would work.

First, a quick anecdote - I run a dirt cheap, crummy Windows server at home
for pet projects. I've been doing this for well over a decade. Maybe two?
Along the way, I wrote a basic web interface for editing files on the server.
Basic upload, rename/move, edit text files kind of thing. For pet projects, I
work on them infrequently, but sometimes an idea will strike me, or I become
aware of a bug or typo, and I just want to get in and fix the issue. Now,
these were simpler times - the most complex code was classic ASP or
JavaScript! The toolchain was non-existent.

A use case for pet projects would be cloud-hosted, cloud-repository, cloud-
pipeline, and now cloud-development. When an idea strikes you, rather than
pull things locally, configure them for that particular project, with that
peculiar set of frameworks and toolchains, you can load up your cloud IDE
which is already configured to point to the repository, build and test in a
container, deploy through a pipeline to the cloud host, and just focus on
making the edits you want without all the work of getting things local.

As someone who spent a few hours the other morning working on a computer I
don't usually work on just getting the git credentials and containers and
runtimes working before I could start getting any work done, I could
definitely see a use case for this cloud-based development paradigm.

~~~
therealx
I build a Windows Service which reports to a SaaS. As-is, I have to uninstall
the app and use a lot of specific tooling if I want to test a larger change
and not go through a bunch of joops. I don't think I'm a good use case for VS
web beside maybe fixing a typo in my repo while I'm on the go.

Years ago, I'd have called myself a dying breed, but I don't think thats true,

------
vsareto
On one hand, this is a pretty easy move to make because of what VSCode already
is.

On the other hand, I don't actually switch contexts that often to warrant
switching to a web IDE full-time.

It will be handy and used for quick edits, but I don't buy their sales pitch.
Hopefully they don't try to go too far with this to the detriment of the
VSCode or start offering web-only features.

~~~
workthrowaway
was going to make a similar comment but mention that i can see this as an
advantage over google and amazon clouds. they can just offer a solid editor
with their offering now, making it easier to develop on their cloud.

~~~
t0astbread
Couldn't Google and Amazon just do the same?

~~~
freehunter
Amazon already has a competitor, Cloud 9. I’ve been constantly surprised that
Amazon and Red Hat have cloud IDEs but Microsoft didn’t.

~~~
benologist
Amazon acquired Cloud9 which was for years open-source and self-hostable.
Today I'm not sure what the licensing situation is, but one thing they did
improve was integration with EC2 so you can specify what type of virtual
machine you want.

------
jbigelow76
Similar to devs feeling the need to develop against a local kubernetes cluster
I guess I'm too old (and I'm not that old!) to see the practical problem being
solved with Visual Studio Online versus the marketing problem we're being told
it solves. The most likely consumers of this are probably going to be far
along the micro-services bandwagon anyway, and between containers, env vars,
feature switches, etc... it's just never seemed necessary to spin up ENTIRE
environments for what should be isolated changes, it's pretty easy to test
against an already running integration environment.

------
drey08
This looks like web-based Visual Studio Code to me, not Visual Studio.

------
z3phyr
Microsoft naming question: Is this a completely different product or is it the
next iteration of visual studio?

Because if it is the latter, I will be saddened beyond limits. Visual Studio
(in its current form) is one of the products from Microsoft that I highly
value. It is arguably the best IDE on the planet right now.

~~~
sparsely
From the screenshots it looks as though it is based on Visual Studio Code,
which is a remarkably efficient electron app and different product to Visual
Studio.

------
misterdata
You can actually spin up your own web-based VSCode using
[https://github.com/cdr/code-server](https://github.com/cdr/code-server).

~~~
xienze
Yep, this works pretty well, but there's two things to be aware of:

1\. They aren't allowed to use Microsoft's extension marketplace for legal
reasons, so they use their own. It honestly kinda sucks though because not all
the extensions are there, they're obviously behind the current version, and
tons of extensions don't work out of the box because the "workaround
marketplace" doesn't correctly build the extensions (lots of GitHub tickets
give the advice of "run npm install in the extension directory").

Of course, that doesn't mean YOU can't configure code-server to use the
Microsoft extension marketplace :). Set these environment variables before you
start:

SERVICE_URL=[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery)

ITEM_URL=[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items)

2\. If you're using Chrome/Safari and not using HTTPS, several extensions
(e.g., vscode-vim and the Java extensions) will stay stuck saying "activating
extensions" forever. There's apparently an issue with Chrome/Safari not
allowing "something" when running over HTTP[1]. This all works on Firefox, but
one thing I've found is that vscode-vim fails with some sort of regexp error
on Firefox. So you should really be running over HTTPS and using
Chrome/Safari.

[1]: [https://github.com/cdr/code-
server/issues/1136](https://github.com/cdr/code-server/issues/1136)

------
kotojo
Here is the actual Microsoft release details page.
[https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/visual-studio-
on...](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/visual-studio-online/)

------
drej
Previous discussion, including a Q&A with the VS Online PM:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442088)

------
bob1029
How does access to the local filesystem work? If there is anything in my way
here, this web variant is dead before it got started as far as I am concerned.

I understand Microsoft probably has a fantastical vision of "everything
through visual studio", but the harsh reality is that I use many tools daily
for one reason or another, and not being able to break out of the visual
studio context and load up my source directory in some other local tool
(without a commit/review/merge/pull cycle) is a total deal-breaker for me.
Sometimes I'll write code that automates other code tasks, so I feel this
would likely not work out well in a context where my files are mostly hidden
from me in OneDrive/GitHub or some other cloud-bound dystopia.

This said, I love Microsoft and everything they have been doing around the
.NET ecosystem lately. It has been going really well. Let's not start making
bad choices now...

~~~
sudhirj
I think you get a VM in Azure that checks out your Github repo and installs
the necessary dependencies.

------
taude
Where this gets interesting is where this and projects like Eclipse Che [1]
are self-hosted in companies that have or want to have dev workflow where the
source code doesn't leave a locked environment (no source allowed on dev's
machine). (Companies that require you to ssh or rdp to a remote dev
environment on some tightly controlled-sub-net.) Naturally, something like
this would need to be host-able on-prem, but it's cool to see advancements in
web-based code editing.

[1] [https://www.eclipse.org/che/](https://www.eclipse.org/che/)

~~~
userbinator
If you need to remote connect to a tightly-controlled machine to work on code,
I don't see why you wouldn't just install all the development tools on that
machine anyway.

~~~
taude
Often you only have access to the corp-approved tools and don't even get
access to install all your custom stuff without IT approval, etc.

------
asenna
I was just exploring how effective iPad Pro would be for pushing code while
traveling. This looks super interesting.

~~~
freehunter
I love web-based IDEs but I haven’t found one that works with an iPad yet. AWS
Cloud 9 kind of worked up until iOS 13 but now it complains about third party
cookies and refuses to let me in. Before iOS 13 it worked but the keyboard had
a lot of problems.

Should be possible, but in my experience it’s just not right now.

~~~
dx034
Have you tried code-server? [1] Works reasonably well for me with iPad.

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

------
thrower123
I'm a little irritated by using the Visual Studio name, when this is really
just VSCode in a browser with some bits and pieces. Similarly with the Mac
version, which again, is not Visual Studio, but Xamarain Studio/MonoDevelop
with some paint and extensions.

It's a bit like saying that your car is a Porsche, when it is really a VW
Rabbit. Sure, both cars are ultimately manufactured by Porsche SE, but it's
not quite the same thing.

------
ChrisSD
The more interesting thing is github integration. Will this provide a more
pleasant way to browse repositories online without having to clone locally?

~~~
skohan
The premise of github integration scares me. What happens to open source
software if the main way to interact with Github-hosted code becomes a
Microsoft hosted web IDE, and everything else becomes a painful, second-class
experience?

~~~
Double_a_92
The git interface is still there... If that happens to suck compared to newer
private solutions then it's just like that. What would to alternative be? Make
it illegal for private companies to create more user friendly innovations?

~~~
skohan
I think it's fine for private companies to innovate. I think it's also
important for us, as developers, to understand when those innovations might
carry risks to our interests in the long-term, and weight that into our
decision making as far as how we build software.

------
tasogare
Nice technical demo but almost 0 practical use case. Money would be best spend
on the local version of Code which is still lacking in polish for C# on macOS,
especially when comparing to the original VS.

Also as expect from MS, they reuse the name of an existing product, Visual
Studio Online (which was the online repro and built system, renamed in Azure
DevOps) for the new system. Super confusing.

~~~
manigandham
Cloud-powered dev environments have many uses, and you can connect to it from
your local VSC or VS as well. The teams working on this are completely
separate from VSC and there's no progress taken away from that product.

C# on macos using visual studio code is powered by the same OmniSharp
extension so you should already have the same experience across platforms. VS
Code is not aiming for perfect parity with Visual Studio though, and likely
never will. There is a separate Visual Studio for Mac product though.

~~~
tasogare
Visual Studio for Mac (formerly MonoDevelop) is even worse in this respect. I
use it for a Xamarin.Android project on my mac but I prefer 10x more the
Windows VS. It's better to have these tools than nothing (like 10 years ago)
but the "Visual Studio" brand create expectations in quality. And both Code
and for Mac are no there yet.

------
shireboy
I've been developing using Visual Studio running on an Azure VM for a while
now, and am looking forward to seeing how this does. The benefits are:

* Your every-day laptop can be lighter and have less "development cruft". It's email, office, and a browser.

* You can upgrade/swap out/use multiple laptops and desktops without losing dev environment

* If you do it right, you can spin up a new dev environment with little effort. I just run "./install-devapps.ps1", which runs a bunch of Chocolatey installs, and have a new VM in a few minutes.

One thing I'm curious about with this new offering is how supporting dev
infrastructure works. I run a dev SMTP server (papercut) and SQL Express on my
dev vm and use in about 90% of my projects. I'd rather not spin up Azure SQL
for every dev project, but I'm wondering if Microsoft might want me to ;)

~~~
ouiitrers
Would you mind explaining your setup?

Does this mean use you use Remote Desktop to go to the Azure VM? Or are you
doing this all on the browser?

How much on average do you pay a month? Thanks for any tips.

~~~
shireboy
I develop mostly ASP.NET + SQL apps for a living, with some Ionic mobile and
other stuff thrown in.

I use my MSDN Azure benefit (~$150/mo) to spin up an F4 VM instance with the
latest Visual Studio Community base image. I have a disk separate from OS
where I keep code, databases, and some powershell to use Chocolatey to install
my dev tools. (everything is also in source control, but this separates data
from OS and makes spinning up a new VM easier). I RDP into it and do all my
work via remote desktop. Cost is ~75$/mo (out of the 150), depending on how
much I work. If I leave the VM up all night it costs more. I use the build in
Auto-shutdown to help with this.

I haven't tinkered with the new options to use VS Code over SSH, but RDP is
working just fine in general. The one issue I can run into is if my client
wants on-prem, it can be hard to publish to their production environments. In
those cases, I usually resort to "cut and paste deployment".

I use a Surface Pro as my desktop, and it has mRemoteNg (a great remote
desktop organizing tool), Office, and Chrome. I do have VS Code on it for one-
off stuff, but no SQL Server Express, VS full, etc. as I always found those
slowed down my PC. I also keep a chocolatey script for installing desktop apps
when I get new hardware.

The end result is both desktop and dev environments are fairly disposable and
portable.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other ?s

------
mark_l_watson
I would like to try this but don’t have an account.

Years ago, a company had a very good Haskell web IDE, that I liked very much,
but they phased out support for it.

Internally at Google, they also have a fantastic all web dev environment.

It is possible, and having a lot of cloud “muscle” for fast builds and tests
makes up for some inconvenience.

------
rb808
My kid now has a Chromebook for school, I'm pretty impressed, lightweight,
amazing battery life, good Lenovo keyboard, screen could be better. It isn't
powerful enough to do dev work, but with something like this terminal-like
laptops could be perfect for dev work.

~~~
Double_a_92
Is it really not powerful enough, or is it just not possible to setup a decent
dev environment because of the Google lock?

~~~
bergie
Chromebooks have been able to run Android apps for a while, so dev environment
via Termux was possible. And newer Chromebooks also can do a Linux container.

But indeed, cheap Chromebooks are not that fast, so running tests etc remotely
can be a good option there.

------
MasterScrat
Brings back memory... 12 years ago we built an online IDE with a friend, you
could actually edit and build C/C++/C# files online. We were expecting people
to love the idea but nooo, we got a full backlash with everyone saying this
trend of reimplementing everything web-based was stupid. Fun times still.

Demo:
[http://lumakey.net/labs/metacoding/Editor/Demo.htm](http://lumakey.net/labs/metacoding/Editor/Demo.htm)

Blog post: [https://masterscrat.github.io/2007/11/20/metacoding-hello-
wo...](https://masterscrat.github.io/2007/11/20/metacoding-hello-world.html)

------
kwshs
That really looks like more than 79 characters per line.

~~~
wongarsu
It doesn't look like a 1024x800 display either ;)

Our code standard has a 150 character max line length, with the formatter
trying for 120. That's working out quite well for us.

------
bullen
I started on making my own web IDE: [http://edit.rupy.se](http://edit.rupy.se)

"Will finish it before I die, maybe."TM

------
twodave
Anyone else getting stuck creating an environment?
"NewResourceGroupAlreadyExists" when I try to create a billing plan. Tried
editing the things under "Advanced" to be unique, to no avail.

Edit: was on my org account. using a personal account works great.

------
datashow
What if my project involves processing lots of data files (not databases), do
I also need to move data files to the cloud?

For example, if my project needs to process thousands of csv and xls files,
will I be able to do everything in the cloud?

------
yzh
Reminds me of Google's cider-ide: [https://code.google.com/archive/p/cider-
ide/](https://code.google.com/archive/p/cider-ide/)

------
trpc
This is great, but how can I use the self-hosted solution? it's advertised in
their website but couldn't find anything in the docs.

------
GnarfGnarf
Time to find alternatives: Qt, Qt Creator.

------
dwniydc2hkynuzh
God help us

------
nikon
Like the remote development addons, this is completely proprietary and
designed to push people to Azure.

------
factorialboy
Embrace. (2017 - Visual Studio Code) Extend. (2019 - Visual Studio Online,
GitHub, Azure DevOps) Extinguish. (???)

~~~
manigandham
That's the old microsoft and was used against competitors. Why would they
extinguish their own products here and what would they gain from it?

~~~
donmcronald
It's not the product that's going to get extinguished. It's the perpetual
licenses that will be gone. You'll be renting forever with massive vendor
lock-in and no negotiating power because, as a cab driver in Mexico told me
when he was charging me 8x the normal rate on a busy night, "the price is the
price."

