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."
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.
> 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?
I don't think people would complain about a decent text editor vs. adding yet another text-like editor. I appreciate the new calculator...
notepad++ is one of the first apps I install on a new windows machine. VS Code is great for when you move into coding tasks but not as snappy and quick as notepad++ for texty things
Notepad++ is one of the first things I install as well, and I think it is even a little more than necessary at times. Unsaved file persistence, Regex, File Encoding, Syntax coloring, and Tabs are about all I truly need from Notepad++. The other 80% of it is excess in my opinion.
A decent text editor doesn't mean VS Code, or anything like that complicated. Just something not as teeth grindingly sucky as Notepad. It wouldn't even have to be all that much better. An 'advanced mode' in the same way that calculator has a scientific mode might be nice as an extra. To be fair Notepad is gradually improving, but this has been an issue for literally decades.
Notepad may look the same, but it has seen some small feature updates in Windows 10. The biggest: it finally understands Unix-style line feed only (\n) files.
Wordpad is a completely different thing, it’s a basic word processor. I’d be quite happy with a slightly better text editor, though as I pointed out Notepad has improved recently and isn’t far off a reasonable set of basic features.
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.
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.
Apple ships Python with OS X, which ended up becoming a big problem because they wrote system utilities that depended on Python2.7, and 9/10 people would want python3 (especially now), so they'd have to go install it anyway and make sure to put it in the right place so that the system uses it's version of python instead of the version the user wants for their applications. (This may have changed in Catalina, but I don't have a Mac at the moment to check). Granted, the Python installer corrects for this, but more versions of python on your system means you have to tell all of your python files that python==python3 or run them in virtualenvs (which you might not want to do in production).
Microsoft, in newer releases of Windows, includes a shim that'll grab python3 from the Microsoft Store if you type python into a terminal, which is a lot nicer, and since they don't have code that requires python2, you can't accidentally break the system if you want a newer version of python around.
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.
I am sure if someone actually cared they could add more functionality to their built in editor without confusing people. They could also increase its performance so it’s possible to edit large files.
Notepad++ is still too heavy. I prefer Notepad2. It doesn't need to be installed and there is a portable version that saves its options in a file instead of the registry.
Line numbers, file tabs, syntax highlighting, visible whitespace, a better find/replace with support for patterns, etc. Multiple cursors would be nice too.
I don't think it needs to have plugin support, a file explorer, VCS features, or any featurs that involve analyzing, building, or debugging code.
Really? I love TextEdit for making quick changes or viewing a file when I don't want to wait for VSCode or Sublime to start up. I just wish it had regex find/replace support.
But when you need to edit text the only thing you can be guaranteed to have is notepad, which (a) has no features and (b) does the basics of text editing terribly
How often does that really happen though, in terms of needing it for general system usage? I have worked in Windows all day for my entire career and it hasn't come up much. When it has, notepad is almost always sufficient to deal with the edge case.
For other kinds of text editing, just download and use whatever text editor has the features you want for the task at hand. If notepad had to be all things to all people it would be bloated and not particularly good at anything anyway, so it's better that it remain a lightweight simple text editor in my opinion.
In their defense, that wasn't Notepad's original purpose in life, hence it's name.
Microsoft unsuccessfully tried to supplant Notepad and Paint but met harsh resistance because there is a disconnect between what these Apps were originally intended for and how people actually use them day to day.
Snip & Sketch comes really close to replacing Paint for 80% of my needs, but I often use Paint to quickly mockup UI, something you can't easily do in S&S yet.
There's nothing from Microsoft that even approaches replacing Notepad for me. Notepad++ is my preferred editor but even it is overkill.
Really the need for a decent text editor out of the box isn't necessary if support for chocolatey repos is the first thing installed.
Having a simple/sane package management either out of the box or within a single step is really the right pattern to enable ease of installing whatever your text editor/customisation of choice is.
Installing atom or Vscode is ridiculously easy, what’s with this obsession that things need to be available out of the box? Perhaps it’s just my conditioning, but I automatically trust software that ships with a windows machine less than any binary I install myself.
>Installing atom or Vscode is ridiculously easy, what’s with this obsession that things need to be available out of the box?
What if your enterprise customer staged a VM for you with no access to the internet and a highly restricted environment? You know what happens in that case? You're editing configuration files in notepad. You'll never run into it because you're just working on your home workstation but a good set of defaults will have an impact on these kinds of use-cases.
Seems like you're solving political problems with technical solutions. One could similarly argue a USB stick or shared drive with infinite vetted piece of software is superior to a single additional text editor pre-installed in the OS (which only solves a single, niche, use-case).
- windows moving to metro, to get its users used to much simpler GUI elements
- embracing open source and move nt kernel to linux kernel, reducing the costs of development
- slowly move its on premise infrastructure to the cloud (office, exchange)
- move windows to the cloud and leave only smaller part local, just to pick up network (and potentially some other devices like graphic card)
- stop developing/selling locally installed windows and move to subscription based in cloud infrastructure
We will see if Satya is stellar or just devil. I have moved after 20 years of system developmeny on Windows to Linux. We will see what will happen.
> windows moving to metro, to get its users used to much simpler GUI elements
Tried in 8, met with utter failure, reverted by 10.
> embracing open source and move nt kernel to linux kernel, reducing the costs of development
...and throwing out pretty much everything that makes Windows better for a Desktop? Including their driver model, their backwards compatibility, etc? Unlikely. Replicating all of that to an appreciable standard would be significantly costly.
> slowly move its on premise infrastructure to the cloud (office, exchange)
This does seem to be happening, much to the chagrin of many, many smaller business that don't like to pay rent on their tools.
> move windows to the cloud and leave only smaller part local, just to pick up network (and potentially some other devices like graphic card)
Possible. Microsoft already has some kind of Windows Desktop as a Service, and RDP is damned good.
> stop developing/selling locally installed windows and move to subscription based in cloud infrastructure
They can try, but at best that just means that a whole lot of people will just stick with the last version of non-subscription-only Windows (as many did with 7 instead of moving to 8-10). I imagine it will be a large enough group that third parties pick up the slack and provide solutions to things MS is no longer fixing. At worst, there will be lynchings.
I can see them stopping the sale of windows, but not really using an online OS. I think they've just given up on the OS war and will try to get users to subscribe to their walled environment (office, azure, onenote, etc).
They're already doing that on mobile, they stopped fighting android and are now trying to be there in the form of apps and services for both android and ios.
Personally I think it makes sense: An OS is becoming more and more a layer to access the web. Most people use just a web browser and a couple other apps. It makes sense for their focus to be not in that layer, but in being the app/web that the user searches for.
Also on cloud level, azure is so much better than amazon (google is outclassed by both). Microsoft is not as loud as it was but still there is no replacement. If they manage to put windows desktop to the cloud, there is not much left for the others.
> I tried WSL but didn't like it to due problems with paths but at this rate with which they're moving
Docker Desktop for Windows seems to still be a bit iffy and WSL is sometimes painfully slow (especially when compiling native code) but overall I'm quite happy with it now thanks to the Remote VSCode extensions.
Exactly my sentiments. Every time I use a different OS - any of those that you mentioned - I find tons of things to complain about that Windows does not suffer from. At the end of the day, most of these operating systems are awesome. But they each have different strengths and weaknesses.
Maybe don't lie if you want to be taken seriously?
I've got 6 different Windows 10 machines active on my home network at any given time and I'm blocking Microsoft Telemetry via Pi-Hole. Microsoft Telemetry doesn't even account for 20% of the blocked traffic.
A couple of cherry picked examples also don't make them "bad" though. Not sure how cherry picked they are, but I seem to be able to counter all those points just from experiences on the machine I'm typing this on; 20% is easy if there's hardly any traffic, isn't it? No seriously, where does this come from? I've never seen this Sugar Bob thing you talk about, and it's also not on my machine currently. All in all, I don't see many of these and similar things people complain about. Any idea why? The reboots aren't exactly unexpected, are they? And I haven't had updates break things for me either so unsure about the quality. I have seen them fix things though.
Then again, which OS is much better on all fronts? Still have to see it, and I tried/use a lot of them.
The updates are a bit ridiculous. I did a clean install, and like I used to do before, I installed all updates right away so I can take my mind off it for a while. But no, Windows 10 kept finding restart-worthy updates for a week. Seems to have stopped now. Is that normal?
That might be a decent approach. I went with blocking some Windows 10 functionality via the hosts file. Many months later, I wanted to download the new Windows Terminal from the Microsoft store and I just could not figure out why the MS store wasn't working properly. After hours and hours I vaguely remembered messing with the hosts file (probably via a Powershell script). I opened it and the evidence was plain to see. I removed all the non-default entries and MS store was working again.
But I saw so many people suffering from the same problem on online forums. Really makes you think as to how many people ran some questionable script, made no backups, and had to reinstall the OS because they didn't know how to revert the changes.
While the business software and development side seems to go to the right direction, the consumer product side is basically series of incompetent and/or anti-customer decision/catastrophes. IMO You were right about Satya, all the positive things happening, because there is someone who can hold against him. (because if he would be the origin of the positive changes, than everything would be improving)
No I haven't due to time constraints. I was just disappointed and uninstalled to free up space. I will be getting some time off soon so I will reinstall and log the issues.
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).
Can any light be shed on why Firefox support is lagging behind?
Releases like this, even in the preview phase, hurt Firefox adoption because people will go to try it out, see it doesn’t work, and think “welp, that’s another website that won’t load. Might as well just switch to Google Chrome”.
Because VSCode is an electron app, meaning that it probably relies on Chromium-only features that they have to find workarounds for in Firefox before things like keyboard shortcuts work. Keyboard shortcuts are probably important to people that want to transition to this, so instead of saying "Firefox works, but not nearly as well as Chrome", they said "Firefox doesn't work, but we're working on it to make sure it works as well as Chrome".
Also, the next major version of Windows will ship with a Chromium-based browser by default, so they probably didn't care about prioritizing it as much as making sure Chrome worked.
This looks to be a very good solution to enterprise companies that want to hire remote contractors as it gives them a platform that is much cheaper and arguable more (easy to) secure than other solutions such as VDI and VPN.
Once this is fully integrated with Azure and Office 365 it’s basically a one stop shop for outsourcing development work and if the pricing remains the same it’s also a very cheap one.
You are missing one of the point of contracting: I'm the only one to decide, what kind of development environment I use and also, the kind of email/calendar/etc environment I use. And if it has anything to do with Office 365 I would not even poke it with a spiky stick covered in feces.
It can be both that poster over estimates just how many people have the luxury of choosing who to contract for based on what tools they have to work with.
In fact it seems to me very petty and unprofessional attitude in the first place.
And it would also prevent them from working for any company in a regulated sector or any company that cares about security and information governance not to mention about productivity; I’ve seen plenty of contractors like this being kicked out after the 3 time they missed a meeting because hipstermail or stallmanmail couldn’t parse the WebEx links in the meeting invite, they couldn’t open a Visio diagram or worse we found they were trying to push code into private repos or using some online code beautification services...
Unless you are working on tiny projects as a contractor you are going to be obligated to use what ever tools the client uses, and in fact adherence to the “company spirit” is often more expected from contractors than internal teams that can get some leeway through internal politics.
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.
This is most likely aimed at Enterprise customers. The main benefit of this seems to be rapid scalability, compared to provisioning each laptop individually, setting up VPNs, etc.
It's similar to how cloud hosting is often considerably more expensive than a full server with equivalent specs. You pay a premium for flexibility.
You source code is hosted in Github. I'd imagine the dev environment is ephemeral and is spun up, code edited, and then disappears until it's provisioned next.
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.
If you don't have them host the environment for you, it doesn't cost a dime. If you have a desktop, or a server (that can run a gui for now, because they don't have a CLI option yet), you can run VSCode locally on there, install the VS Online extension, and register it with your VS Online account. You can then use VS Online "self hosted", with it connecting to your machine, for free.
My only issue is that it doesn't seem to work with SSH Remote environments yet (I use my desktop VSCode to connect to my servers), just environments local to your VSCode install. But I would expect support will be coming.
RDP essentially takes video of your machine and transfers it over the internet. Same with keyboard and mouse interactions. Which has 3 main flaws:
1) If your internet connection isn't great, the responsiveness is terrible.
2) If you're using a slow machine as a guest, it can choke on the video feed
3) If you're using a metered bandwidth connection (sometimes I have to tether off my phone, which gets 5gb of data a month) you can quickly chew through your data. One time I capped out my data for the month just trying to do this for a couple hours.
On the other hand, VSCode is electron based, which means the entire UI can just be loaded into the browser. Then the only interactions passed across the net is low bandwidth text. Much more responsive because the keyboard/mouse responses are local, much less bandwidth intensive.
I already enjoy this using VSCode with SSH Remote to remote environments, and I had given up on my chromebook since other cloud IDEs have left me wanting. VS Online might bring my chromebook back into rotation again.
> One time I capped out my data for the month just trying to do this for a couple hours.
I have an LTE data plan that's limited to 3Mbit/s and I don't have a problem working over RDP. It uses about 100MB per hour.
I guess I just don't get the appeal. If you use VSO exclusively, it's super expensive. If you use it casually, you still need to have a local development environment and RDP seems reasonable for casual use.
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.
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.
> non-business reason to outsource my IDE workloads to a datacenter.
I'm not sure what non-business reasons matter, perhaps you meant corporate mandates dictated from above?
I've made the switch to cloudbased IDE's and they are fantastic.
Granted I have my work laptop, a spare laptop (running OSX for historical reasons), and a powerful PC. The cloud IDE's--specifically AWS Cloud9, allows me to seamlessly switch between them.
It also means, I never have to carry a laptop with me. I just need my phone, and desktop class browser for emergency scenarios.
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.
A problem I've run across is that machines with small SSDs are often not suitable for Visual Studio (the 'real' VS, not VS Code) if you want to do certain kinds of native development.
Installing some combinations of dev tools eats significant chunks of hard drive space, and worse, a lot of that space seems to be on C:, which often is a small SSD. You can ask for Visual Studio to install on other drives, but it will still eat a chunk of space on C:. The installer actually shows how much space will be used up on the system drive. Also VS is very slow if SSDs aren't available -- the VS docs recommend an SSD, in fact.
None of this matters to professional Windows (C++/C#) developers with 512GB-1TB SSDs or more, but remember than you can get started with Node, or Java, or Python, on much more lower-end machines. It's also much quicker to install and get started with these platforms.
So yes, anything that reduces developer friction and gets them to consider building rich Windows apps is a good thing for Microsoft -- it's almost too late already, but making it brain-dead easy to develop rich, native Windows apps would be a great start. They could and should offer free/low-cost online environments for hobbyists and students, for instance.
At least in the late 2000's, input latency made this incredibly painful for me over all but the very best connections. I haven't tried it since then, but maybe some of the Stadia tech can improve things.
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.
Thin clients are not exactly a new thing and mean that you are completely out of luck if you have a bad/no internet connection.
Also, you probably still want a decent screen and keyboard and need to pay for the remote machine as well, at which point it becomes not really cheaper.
> 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.
If I'm traveling light, a 1.5KG Macbook Pro or X1 Carbon Thinkpad is not going to cause me problems, and I'd much rather go without extra t-shirts or sandals (which I can buy and toss) than my laptop.
OTOH, one of my biggest issues with traveling, especially to foreign countries outside the West, is lack of decent internet. Numerous times I basically just had to work offline the best I could using my real IDE and local git repos, and then sync up at an expensive hotel or restaurant with decent wifi, in which I wasn't staying or eating (i.e. use it quickly to sync, not sit there all day).
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.
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.
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,
You get a Linux (with windows "soon") box in your environment, and all of your code comes in to it and is executed there. You have root. What tools can you not run from within the container? (especially considering that if you really needed to, you could set your local workstation as another environment and move files in between, although at that point why do you need a online IDE (except for conf. management).
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.
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.
I'm really not a fan of the trend towards everything being remote-hosted. With things like this and also Stadia and Google Colab, it seems like the big three cloud providers are rushing us toward a world where almost everything is executed in a datacenter somewhere, and your workstation is just an interface.
I think this development is especially dangerous with how Microsoft is positioned with Github. They already own where a huge percentage of open-source code is hosted. If they also come to own the defacto place that code is compiled and executed, that would give them a huge amount of power in the industry.
If you're not in control of the hardware your code is compiled and executed on, someone else can place limits on what works and what doesn't. Who's to say Microsoft wouldn't use that to benefit Azure and Windows to the detriment of competitors, consumers, and developers.
Not sure how Stadia fits in with the rest. Modern games require more computing power than the average person has access to, so I think it makes sense to give users the option to offload that to the cloud.
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.
Given that the engine driving VS Code (Monaco [1]) is MIT licensed, I'm sure they could. There are already a fair number of cloud-IDE-providers, like StackBlitz, based on Monaco.
As an additional bit of trivia, it seems that Erich Gamma (of GoF patterns fame) had a significant hand in the development of Monaco [2]. There are a number of videos where he takes Scott Hanselman through the tech, back in 2014.
It's a cloud dev environment running in a VM (which you provision). It can work directly in the browser using the VS Code shell or you can connect to it with your locally running VS Code or Visual Studio.
Not sure what you mean here. The only thing running locally is the lightweight shell. Builds/indexing&search/language services/etc. all happen on the remote host.
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.
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.
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.
It looks more like online version of VS Code + some integration with VS Code/Visual Studio - work in browser or import your settings/envirnoment into local IDE.
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:
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully its implementation is browser and OS agnostic on the client. I've had difficulty using Office 365 and OneDrive web access on Linux, which means I can't even consider using those services in a professional workflow.
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.
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?
It worries me too. Why bother setting up a local dev environment if it's a single click to get up and going on GitHub, right?
Everyone is too eager to set themselves up to be taken advantage of tomorrow as long as they can save a minute today, often by spending their employers' money. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually the free tier of GitHub comes with X free build minutes, X free Visual Studio Online minutes, etc.. That way you never learn to do anything for yourself and as soon as you need to scale up you're extremely vendor locked and overpaying for your tooling.
Remember how everyone freaked out when JetBrains switched to their "subscription" pricing? They charge $650 / year for every IDE or $150 for the personal license. Visual Studio Online is around $1000 / year for a single editor if you figure a 2080 hour work year and there's no personal license.
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?
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.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. What if, for instance, they built a fully-integrated package management solution into Github+VSWeb which wasn't based on git? There are a million ways they could create soft vendor lock-in with value added features.
Vscode has been great open source tool and ms has been heavily investigating in open source community. I think it is safe to assume for now that they will leave git alone as is.
> Vscode has been great open source tool and ms has been heavily investigating in open source community.
But why? Corporations rarely invest in projects which don't support their own self-interest. And why should they? Microsoft is not a charity.
Microsoft owns github. Microsoft produces one of the most used code editors out there at the moment. Microsoft is heavily invested in the Linux foundation. It would be foolish to assume that such a massive corporation with a history of anti-consumer and anti-developer behavior would never leverage their position to their own benefit.
What incentive does Microsoft have to act in a benevolent way?
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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
Not the parent, but I've looked into this and here's my take.
1. Yes RDP
2. The cost can vary obviously, but let's take a lower-end 4vcore 16GB Windows VM (B4MS) - $29.12 (160 hours per month of usage)
3. 512GB of SSD storage - $38.40 a month
It's not a bad setup if you need flexibility to scale up your VM.
My kid now has a Chromebook for school, I'm pretty impressed, lightweight, amazing battery life, good Lenovo keyboard, screen could be better. It isn't powerful enough to do dev work, but with something like this terminal-like laptops could be perfect for dev work.
Chromebooks have been able to run Android apps for a while, so dev environment via Termux was possible. And newer Chromebooks also can do a Linux container.
But indeed, cheap Chromebooks are not that fast, so running tests etc remotely can be a good option there.
Brings back memory... 12 years ago we built an online IDE with a friend, you could actually edit and build C/C++/C# files online. We were expecting people to love the idea but nooo, we got a full backlash with everyone saying this trend of reimplementing everything web-based was stupid. Fun times still.
Anyone else getting stuck creating an environment? "NewResourceGroupAlreadyExists" when I try to create a billing plan. Tried editing the things under "Advanced" to be unique, to no avail.
Edit: was on my org account. using a personal account works great.
It's not the product that's going to get extinguished. It's the perpetual licenses that will be gone. You'll be renting forever with massive vendor lock-in and no negotiating power because, as a cab driver in Mexico told me when he was charging me 8x the normal rate on a busy night, "the price is the price."
They would of course extinguish competitors' products.
Why should we provide toolchains for you to download, just use this... . No, no, you don't want to use your own choice of middleware but the one we preconfigured in the VM... .
What they would gain from this? Rent, obviously. No, no, making this work with the offline software you bought is complicated (because we want it to be), just paying our monthly subscription is much easier...
TBH I liked the old M$ more - a rather predictable actor that didn't try to monetize their core software in extremely unfortunate ways that alienate their userbase very effectively.
I'll never feel comfortable with OS pushing me adverts in OS menus. Can't avoid Win10 for PC gaming (no, there are unfortunately no good enough alternatives for what I want).
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."