Hey All! I’m a PM on the Visual Studio Online team (as well as Live Share and IntelliCode), and we’re extremely excited to have more developers try out the product. Our goal is to dramatically reduce the cost of setup/onboarding, enable better team/classroom collaboration, and further support remote development. We believe that having on-demand, cloud-powered dev environments, that are accessible from VS Code and the web, provides a huge step towards achieving that.
Let us know if you have any questions/comments/feedback, since we’re very keen to begin working with the broader developer community, and learning how we can continue to improve. Otherwise, check out the service (https://aka.ms/vso), and then let us know what you think (https://GitHub.com/microsoftdocs/vsonline).
So this is NOT Visual Studio but rather VSCode? Do you have insight into why Microsoft keeps making misleading product names? Would it be so horrible to name it VSCode Online instead of Visual Studio Online?
> Let us know if you have any questions
The website says "Use the programming languages and frameworks of your choice". Will that include building and debugging C++ Win32 MFC applications?
This is from the company that came up with .NET to describe an intermediate bytecode and runtime.
Then later made a new thing called .NET Core which was the same as .NET Framework but more multi platform. Which was confusing so they came up with .NET Standard which was an interface describing compatibility between the other two .NETs
They have their top people working on the .NET jit and compiler, and the VS Code editor. None left for naming conventions.
And that is all before you get to the frameworks. The latest "ASP" framework is called "ASP.NET Core" which succeeded "ASP.NET 4" and confusingly is available for both ".NET Framework" and ".NET Core".
While we released the public preview of the VS Code and web based clients, we also released a private preview of the VS client, which is actually fully optimized to support C#/C++ development. If you’re interested in giving it a try, sign up and we’ll get in touch with you soon!
Trying to work in this world, and keep up with what I'm supposed to be using for the platform and application in question. As programmers, we expect some level of complexity, but when Microsoft's lead tech evangelist feels the need to make multiple posts to explain the situation with the product lines, it might have gotten a little out of hand.
Is there documentation somewhere for the self-hosted environment option, which according to the product landing page and pricing page is no cost? I'm guessing the flow there is to use VSCode through the online site, but give ssh credentials to one of your servers that's running the Remote SSH VSCode environment. But once I go to Create an Environment, there's no option for a self-hosted one.
OK, I got this working for my Desktop VSCode environment and that works great. But I'm guessing this wasn't tested in combination with the SSH Remote extension?
I can register my local VSCode just fine. When I connect to a remote ssh connection, and try to register that environment, I get a prompt telling me "Failed to register local environment: Install the Azure Account extension". When I look up that extension, I can install it in the SSH environment, but I get the same error still.
Gotcha. I'll admit since there weren't any instructions on doing it in the online admin, and in the docs it's not listed as a subpoint, I got disheartened when I reached the docs and missed it being underneath the instructions for Cloud-hosted. I wouldn't have expected a backwards flow for the self-hosted option, but that's doable. It might be more user friendly for the article to have the headings "Create an environment (Cloud-hosted)" and "Create an environment (Self-hosted)" in the "In this article" menu on the side, or for the "Create an Environment" section to tree both on that side-menu, so it's not missed.
I looked at that page and I just wanted to clarify something for myself. Does this mean you can't do a headless server since you need VS Code and some plugins? I like the idea and it would definitely be a strong argument to go back to VS Code but I was hoping I could just run some kind of server on a terminal-only VM.
"Presently, running the "Register" command via a full instance of VS Code is the only supported flow, but the scenario you described of hosting a server without a GUI is on the product roadmap."
I'm personally not a huge fan of this, since I can't see the (as in: my) benefit of this. I don't have an azure account yet (this is where the benefit for MS is I guess ;) ).
I would love to just register my selfhosted environment without any hassles.
Maybe this would even bring more people to register their selfhosted environment, which could bring more people to buy a hosted environment. Could potentially even benefit MS to lower the initial hurdle for new users.
>Let us know if you have any questions/comments/feedback
1) Shortcut keys. I hit some shortcut during my hello world testing that didn't have the expected effect (because browser). Given how keyboard heavy developing is are there any plans on unifying this more somehow - VS / VSC / VSO?
2) I gather this is still free, but I assume this will be running off azure credits later?
3) The machines seemed a little heavy spec'd for me. Powerful is nice & a big draw card for cloud. But for my personal use case (casual python) I can see the sweet spot being lower.
4) Please fix the permission request wordings on first launch. Very awkwardly phrased & still not entirely sure what it was asking. It was asking for maintaining some mystery permissions when I'm not online or some such thing?
For #3, we’ll be adding a “Basic” SKU soon, that includes 2 cores and 4 GB RAM. Would that be sufficient for your use cases? You can track the progress of this enhancement here: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsonline/issues/54.
#4: Thanks for the feedback! I’ll look into improving that text this week.
Is the iPad's Safari browser considered a "first class citizen" from a testing/breakage perspective? And on a related note, do you have/know what the minimum requirements will look like? For example, could a low powered ARM-based Chromebook utilize it?
Safari on iPad is a critical scenario for us, however, it isn’t currently “officially” supported. Yet! Stay tuned to this GitHub issue, where we’ll provide updates on this very soon: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsonline/issues/33.
Regarding requirements, you could absolutely run the web editor from a Chromebook! Being able to utilize low-powered devices, while using real-world dev tools, is something we’re excited to enable with this service.
Thanks for the feedback! We definitely want to make onboarding to a GitHub repo as simple as possible. This is something we’ll be looking to gather feedback on from the community, so stay tuned as we iterate rapidly in the coming months.
I never had anything but problems with my Microsoft and Azure accounts because of confusing UX. If I have to deal with live.microsoft.com I won’t use it. But, if you let me login with GitHub I might try it out. I don’t want to link my GitHub account. I want that to be the primary account used to access VS Live.
I’m guessing that won’t happen though since you’ll want everyone to be ready to use Azure.
Looks like the default VS Online dotnet sdk is set to LTS[1] which breaks my ASP.NET Core 3.0 project in an interesting way. The initial startup Oryx build succeeds[2] but the Omnisharp dotnet restore command fails[3].
[1] In ~/.bashrc: PATH=$PATH:/opt/oryx:/opt/nodejs/lts/bin:/opt/dotnet/sdks/lts
[3]
```
/opt/dotnet/sdks/2.1.802/sdk/2.1.802/Sdks/Microsoft.NET.Sdk/targets/Microsoft.NET.TargetFrameworkInference.targets(137,5): error NETSDK1045: The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET Core 3.0. Either target .NET Core 2.1 or lower, or use a version of the .NET SDK that supports .NET Core 3.0
```
Interestingly enough, many people thought the original VSO was an online web IDE. And so in this case, we decided that it made sense to re-purpose the brand for a product that met many people’s expectations. Visual Studio Online: This time, it’s for real!
Your extension should “just work”. And yes, we have a self-hosted environment solution that you can use to test out your extension in the web, and it’s entirely free: https://aka.ms/vso-docs/vscode/self-hosted.
If you run into trouble, we've also expanded the Remote Development extension guide in VS Code documentation to cover Visual Studio Online as well: https://aka.ms/vso-docs/developing-extensions
A clean online, and shared, environment seems like a better way to do PR reviews with the author than doing a Live Share.
Does the platform support that? Or wants to?
What I would like to stop a comment thread and jump to online-video-session to review some code. Live Share works but requires a stable environment by one of the parties which might be troublesome with some code.
The same team that builds Visual Studio Online also builds Live Share, and so we care very deeply about collaboration. That said, you can spin up a new environment for a PR and then start a Live Share session from there. This allows others on the team to jump in, and leave comments, entirely asynchronously, and without requiring a specific “host” to be online.
We have a lot more to do in order to make this scenario truly shine, but we’re very excited about the possibilities moving forward. I’d love to hear more about your specific thoughts on PR reviews, and what kind of workflow your team would find compelling.
I think that matches perfectly what I have imagined. async and sync work support for PR reviews.
a) People not currently working on a repo (don't have a local build environment setup) and do tweaks and suggest improvements (e.g. add a unit test to prove make a bug clear) in a async way.
b) A tech lead/senior developer can request the author to join a live session to go explain the whole PR has a bad approach or misses a base guideline on the repo. Not sure on this case how a summary of review session should be added (maybe the PR should have a log of review sessions done).
c) A teach lead takes the PR has an opportunity to ask the whole team to join a review so that he can point out a recurring issues on the repo or to just align ideas on code quality.
I'm very excited about this! I recently switched to desktop + iPad, and I can't currently code at all on the iPad because all the apps I tried suck. I'm hoping that VS Online will solve my problem.
This is absolutely a problem we hope to solve :) We’ll be adding “official” support for Safari on iPad soon, so stay tuned, and please don’t hesitate to reach out to let us know any feedback/questions you may have.
> Let us know if you have any questions/comments/feedback
OK. What you wrote on that web site, "run, and debug your applications from any device", reads like a false advertisement.
I do CAD/CAM/CAE, for that I need a physical GPU. I do embedded, for that I need custom physical hardware, running specific build of Linux. I do multimedia, for that I need a physical GPU with all their hardware codecs. I do GPGPU, same thing.
Maybe you should specify which types of applications are actually supported?
That’s totally fair. Over time, our goal is to expand the platforms and application types we support (we’re currently focused on web/APIs), because we believe value props remain the same, regardless if you’re doing desktop, mobile, data science, etc.
That said, we can definitely make sure to be clearer about where we’re at in our journey towards enabling this promise more broadly. Apologies for the confusion!
In the meantime, we also allow registering your own machines with the service, since we’ll never be able to provide all of the customized environments that devs need. With this “self-hosted environment”, you can benefit from the remote tooling experience (including the web editor), with your own compute. I’d love to hear if this would be helpful for you and your specific workloads.
If you have a moment could you send me an email? Mine is in my profile. I'd love to try out this product but there is something that has prevented me from using it. I'm hoping you might be able to get me to the right help I need.
It would be great if there would be a free tier for people that want to learn C++ with VS. Something that lets you use VS online for small C++ programs (similar with Compiler Explorer but with support for running the generated binary) to build and run these small programs.
What's left? What can you own and control and sell and restrict?
The Chinese economy doesn't have intellectual property restrictions to speak of, would you prefer that economy? (everything is a copy of a copy of a copy and most of it is terrible)
How do specialist tools get created, things of high value which take a lot of work to produce and have only a small number of users?
We use money and restrictions on property to allocate resources, if you take that away there is still allocation, but is it always better? (say, squabbling wikipedia or stackoverflow zealots)
1. Intellectual Property is not about "allocation of resources". IP is not physical property (which is a separate question). IP is the threat of punishment for using or copying information.
2. The Chinese economy actually has plenty of IP restrictions (e.g. Huawei is very keen on patents); and China is a signatory to the Berne convention. Some Chinese corporations may have failed to observe it, but this is not legal.
3. How would specialist tools get created? Depends on whether the economy is more Capitalist or less so. Maybe large corporations need those tools and will put money into consortia which produce them. Maybe there are lots of small organizations, public/state organs, and/or individual artisans/professionals which need them - so either they pool resources, or the government funds such projects. If the economy is not money-based, then it's a different kettle of fish.
I agree that, as developers, we can't ignore people who use MSVC on Windows. But we shouldn't encourage _this_ kind of initiative, especially among junior developers. They shouldn't be caught in the web of depending on Microsoft for things.
eh, we're already seeing that with all the "free" online IDEs that have proliferated.
i've switched all my python code kata-ing to microsoft azure jupyter notebooks for eg, used to use cloud9 before they got bought out by amazon
I would like that. My work machine just crashed so I had to reimage it and then install all dev tools. Getting all the SQL server installs, Visual studio and a lot of other tools and their configuration back takes several days. It would be nice if we could set up a template for a full dev environment that everybody can use. I know a lot of companies have that but you need management to understand the issue which is often not the case.
I use Nix for this. I have a library of building blocks that I import and customize to make `shell.nix` files, and then use nix-shell. Unfortunately, the Nix design patterns (though not the language, really) are esoteric and rather unstable, at the mercy of nixpkgs.
If there were a "scene" around nixpkgs the way there is around apt PPAs, everyone could just put a shell.nix in their Githubs and onboarding would be instant. Still, I wish someone would get behind a FOSS project like nixpkgs.
Agreed! The on-demand dev environments are the real star here. Whether you use the web editor is up to you, since we also support working from your existing VS Code desktop setup as well. That said, we’ve found that having the option of a full-fidelity web editor, that’s fully interopable with VS Code desktop, can provide valuable flexibility for many use cases (e.g. making a quick edit when out of the office, doing a “rich” PR review in the browser).
> What is the use case for a hosted Visual Studio Code?
The same as Amazon cloud9, and other online IDE, it's about not having to install any SDK on your own computer to develop apps, which is really handy in the era of cheap SSD laptops and mobility.
I have used cloud9 for years, unfortunately the editor itself hasn't had a real update for a long time. So VS online is a welcome addition.
I think some people see value in it as a security feature, or ease of development environment setup. There are also collaborative code editing features. You can both get into a file and type in it at the same time. You can get into your project and work on it from any machine, anywhere, even a phone, potentially.
Personally though, I would never take a job where you do most of your coding in the cloud.
That's a pretty compelling reason for me. There are some projects (like Chrome, Firefox, or even OpenSceneGraph) that aren't trivial to compile entirely from source. It would be pretty sweet to have a ready-to-build environment with the project and all dependencies one click away.
Agreed, it is compelling. But not enough to overcome my abhorrence for adding latency to the development process!
I wouldn't mind having that as an option though. Like, laptop in for repair, use the online dev environment. Traveling and have to fix a critical bug, hop on the cloud environment.
You should always have the option to run locally and ofcourse you can already do what you want via remote desktop/vnc/etc. I do and it works well (it's really fast usually for me; it feels faster than the mbp I have because when something is compiling, my local laptop doesn't feel like it's turning into a slow stream of lava).
Web-assembly might help some here; it should be possible for the devs to split this up, depending on the tasks, to client and serverside, maybe depending on your computer specs and on the requirements of the task at hand. That should fix the latency for tasks that need to be instant (code completion) and tasks that can be a few seconds/minutes (compiling/packing). I am aware these are mixed tasks while developing so clever use should be made of what can be done locally and what should be done remotely.
We’ve seen significant interest in folks wanting greater “device flexibility”, and so we’re excited to allow devs to use the tools they love from anywhere, and on any device. Since the browser is the universal app distribution platform, having a full-fidelity VS Code-based web editor, along with a powerful compute runtime, provides you with a companion tool (along with your desktop client) to choose the right tool for each task.
I assume that if you're trying to do this, you've got a keyboard attached to your iPad - I think I'd rather stick forks in my eyes than try to code with an on-screen keyboard. So at that point, why not just use a laptop?
The Apple folio keyboard is actually really good. Even compared to my 12" Macbook the 11" iPad Pro is still more portable, plus I use the Apple Pencil a lot.
Edit code directly on Azure Services (e.g. Azure Functions) and real-time test the results of the changes. Aside from that just convenience for developers if you want to develop across multiple devices with internet connectivity (or using an iPad's web-browser), and as an alternative to a remote VM/Nano on a terminal.
The use case for VSCode Online is the same as any other remote development environment, combine it with deployment workflows and or integrated services like Azure and it practically sells itself. Just like Slack the secret sauce here isn't the service itself, it is how it ties into everything else.
Nano/vim/emacs/etc over a remote (SSH) terminal, remote VM, or remote session via other means (e.g. VNC/RDC/etc). People use Visual Studio itself remotely via VMs and RDC.
Yep, I use Remotix on a remote mac on my ipad pro. It works well mostly. When the bandwidth is not sufficient, it really drives one up a wall ofcourse...
One quite significant difference though; portability.
Also not quite $1000s; $800 for the ipad (and a $400 one would do fine) and $20/mo for the mac. Beats a mbp most of the time in a modern 4g/wifi environment. Ofcourse there are many caveats; embedded programming, game programming, mobile app testing etc. But I still do about 60-70% (depending) on it; it's great for building / testing / deploying API's and some months that's all I do.
Whether you’re working on a long-term project, a short-lived feature branch, or want to quickly review a pull request, Visual Studio Online can help you be more productive by providing a fully configured development environment in minutes. By pointing to a Git repo, Visual Studio Online sets up everything you need to focus on being productive:
* Source code
* Runtimes
* Linters & debuggers
* Extensions
I'm sure there's a value proposition in there somewhere, but looking at the way "software as a service" type models have been abused once users are committed and specifically looking at Microsoft's track record with things like the Zune DRM debacle, I think you'd have to be out of your mind to transition your company or team over to this.
I recently transitioned to office 365 a year or two ago. Boy that was a huge mistake. Even though I still have 5 shares available, apparently they require office 365 users to login once a month, or they'll lock you out of your own software. Which makes zero sense because since I still have shares, there's not really a viable way to abuse that.
This recently screwed me during the PG&E shutoffs and easily cost me $1000 in downtime for me and my team.
Imagine you are in a cave, for no apparent reason, and your computer is no where to be found. The only computer there is a n old school terminal that is somehow running IE11. Your colleague commits something with tabs instead of spaces and you get the notification on your phone. Now you can easily login to VSCode online to re-indent everything with spaces, commit and push it back up, all through your web browser.
Thanks for the feedback! Docker Compose support is on our roadmap, and you can track progress of it here: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsonline/issues/35. If you could upvote that issue, that would be much appreciated!
I love the Remote SSH extension for VSCode (save for the frustrating workarounds necessary for ssh-agent forwarding -- an absolutely necessary feature) and expected VSO to be much more streamlined. But I find myself hitting early walls:
- No documentation on how to clone a private github repo, gitlab repo, etc.
- Cloning a private repo on the command line eschews the ability to bootstrap your VSO instance using the in-repo config, which kills a huge benefit of this product
- No documentation on forwarding ssh-agent or injecting RSA keys of any kind
There are some other needs addressed in other comment threads (particularly registering a remote headless box as a VSO machine) but the above are instant showstoppers. Perhaps this works with private Azure DevOps repos because of the login integration? I'd be willing to wager that the majority of folks interested in this are on other repo hosts, though.
Interestingly there is 1 white woman per 9 people of color on that page. Obviously, marketing the tool as accessible is a good thing, but doesn't this negatively resonate with common blue-collar folk as being a buggy half-baked corporate thing developed by H1B Indians? I don't have any negativity against anyone here, but it feels to be a taboo topic which is not touched or discussed, and I'd like to get some perspective on how it is perceived by people.
A solid browser based IDE would pare well with Azure or some other cloud provider. Specifically, “serverless” products where devs can focus on code, disregarding environment issues. AWS acquired Cloud9. Google Cloud Function has an in-browser code editor for inline editing, but it’s not aware of any language constructs beyond syntax highlighting.
This can be used to set up environments for Open Source projects to ease new contributors onboarding. Would be cool if I could click a button and I found myself in a fully set up environment with the project's Git repo checked out.
So, VS Express 2010 was 500Mb, then VS 2019 Express required 11 Gb for installation. When it has grown to 100Gb they decided to move it in the cloud.
I said thank you and compiled everything with MINGW on Linux. Apt installed mingw in 30 seconds. And no pain with perl script to create VS solutions, import and configure them, same cmake build works just fine.
Let us know if you have any questions/comments/feedback, since we’re very keen to begin working with the broader developer community, and learning how we can continue to improve. Otherwise, check out the service (https://aka.ms/vso), and then let us know what you think (https://GitHub.com/microsoftdocs/vsonline).