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Microsoft’s web-based version of Visual Studio

166 points by _davebennett 7y ago

z3phyr 7y ago
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.
- achn 7y ago
  No, this is more like taking VS Code (already an electron app) and integrating a fully web-based backend. VS desktop is not going away any time soon.
- sparsely 7y ago
  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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fenring 7y ago
  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.
- LandR 7y ago
  I think Rider is better now, Visual Studio for me is now so slow and it hangs / crashes multiple times a day. Rider is rock solid and basically has Resharper included and has better extensions.
- throwaway744678 7y ago
  As said above, it looks like an online VSCode + remote containers on Azure to run your apps. And it may also be accessed from inside Visual Studio. I can't see them deprecating the classical VS IDE, for at least the following reasons: - we will always need tools to develop native applications - some applications can't realistically or practically run in remote containers (eg. video games) - some organizations won't accept their source code to be uploaded anywhere else than on company machines
drey08 7y ago
This looks like web-based Visual Studio Code to me, not Visual Studio.
kwshs 7y ago
That really looks like more than 79 characters per line.
- bvda 7y ago
  The future is now
- wongarsu 7y ago
  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.
kotojo 7y ago
Here is the actual Microsoft release details page. https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/visual-studio-online/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/visual-studio-on...
vsareto 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Couldn't Google and Amazon just do the same?
    - freehunter 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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.
    - danielbarla 7y ago
      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. [1] https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Gamma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Gamma
asenna 7y ago
I was just exploring how effective iPad Pro would be for pushing code while traveling. This looks super interesting.
- nessunodoro 7y ago
  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.
- freehunter 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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
  - balls187 7y ago
    Ran into that same bug as well. Was excited to give iPadOS a try with the accessibility features. Seems like an error in Safari not honoring the 3rd Party Cookie setting.
drej 7y ago
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
ChrisSD 7y ago
The more interesting thing is github integration. Will this provide a more pleasant way to browse repositories online without having to clone locally?
- skohan 7y ago
  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?
  - dannyw 7y ago
    The threat of GitLab.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    IMHO as long as Github still provides a git interface, that shouldn't be a problem.
    - skohan 7y ago
      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.
      - thrower123 7y ago
        Nobody is going to let them go back to TFS. Git has won, for good or for bad.
        skohan 7y ago
        Git == GitHub for many, many developers. I wouldn't count it out as a possibility.
  - 7y ago
devtanna 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    It's also pretty much a security and privacy nightmare.
  - dogma1138 7y ago
    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.
  - balls187 7y ago
    > 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.
- joecot 7y ago
  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. https://aka.ms/vso-docs/vscode/self-hosted https://aka.ms/vso-docs/vscode/self-hosted 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.
misterdata 7y ago
You can actually spin up your own web-based VSCode using https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server.
- dx034 7y ago
  I use it regularly and love it. It's surprisingly easy to set up and works well with Chrome & Firefox.
- xienze 7y ago
  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
StanAngeloff 7y ago
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).
- manigandham 7y ago
  It's in preview. Firefox is coming: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsonline/issues/34 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsonline/issues/34 Check the prev discussion that has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442088
  - ecf 7y ago
    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”.
    - jedieaston 7y ago
      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.
- 7y ago
factorialboy 7y ago
Embrace. (2017 - Visual Studio Code) Extend. (2019 - Visual Studio Online, GitHub, Azure DevOps) Extinguish. (???)
- manigandham 7y ago
  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?
  - tsukurimashou 7y ago
    ask google :^)
  - saiya-jin 7y ago
    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).
  - diffeomorphism 7y ago
    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...
  - donmcronald 7y ago
    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."
taude 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- dx034 7y ago
  Code-Server[1] already offers that based on VSCode. It's hostable on-prem, works out-of-the-box and free to use. [1] https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dwniydc2hkynuzh 7y ago
God help us
tasogare 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
manigandham 7y ago
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 7y ago
  I was hoping for some first hand impressions from it but no, its basically just a re-hosted press announcement.
rb808 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Is it really not powerful enough, or is it just not possible to setup a decent dev environment because of the Google lock?
  - bergie 7y ago
    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.
  - rb808 7y ago
    Google lock is a big part of it, though Crostini looks to fix that. The main part is though most Chromebooks have low powered processors like Celerons, which is great for price, battery life, weight and heat.
twodave 7y ago
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.
trpc 7y ago
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.
jbigelow76 7y ago
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.
GnarfGnarf 7y ago
Time to find alternatives: Qt, Qt Creator.
seanwilson 7y ago
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.
- signal11 7y ago
  Great point about powerful/expensive laptops. 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.
- sorenjan 7y ago
  It's probably great for border crossings into countries that demands to look through your private data, like the US and Canada.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > 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!
thrower123 7y ago
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.
IGotThroughIt 7y ago
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.
- kexx 7y ago
  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)
- nicoburns 7y ago
  > due to electrons memory hogging issues a while back. You realise VSCode is also electron based, right?
  - IGotThroughIt 7y ago
    Noticed it almost instantly and edited. You probably didn't see the edit due to hn's caching.
    - sillysaurusx 7y ago
      There’s no caching for logged-in users. Not that it takes away from your point, I just love how the codebase is designed.
TheRealDunkirk 7y ago
"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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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,
mark_l_watson 7y ago
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.
yzh 7y ago
Reminds me of Google's cider-ide: https://code.google.com/archive/p/cider-ide/ https://code.google.com/archive/p/cider-ide/
shireboy 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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
bob1029 7y ago
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 7y ago
  I think you get a VM in Azure that checks out your Github repo and installs the necessary dependencies.
nikon 7y ago
Like the remote development addons, this is completely proprietary and designed to push people to Azure.
datashow 7y ago
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?
bullen 7y ago
I started on making my own web IDE: http://edit.rupy.se http://edit.rupy.se "Will finish it before I die, maybe."TM
MasterScrat 7y ago
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-world.html https://masterscrat.github.io/2007/11/20/metacoding-hello-wo...

166 points by _davebennett 7y ago

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.

achn 7y ago
No, this is more like taking VS Code (already an electron app) and integrating a fully web-based backend. VS desktop is not going away any time soon.
sparsely 7y ago
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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fenring 7y ago
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.
LandR 7y ago
I think Rider is better now, Visual Studio for me is now so slow and it hangs / crashes multiple times a day. Rider is rock solid and basically has Resharper included and has better extensions.
throwaway744678 7y ago
As said above, it looks like an online VSCode + remote containers on Azure to run your apps. And it may also be accessed from inside Visual Studio. I can't see them deprecating the classical VS IDE, for at least the following reasons: - we will always need tools to develop native applications - some applications can't realistically or practically run in remote containers (eg. video games) - some organizations won't accept their source code to be uploaded anywhere else than on company machines

drey08 7y ago

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

kwshs 7y ago

That really looks like more than 79 characters per line.

bvda 7y ago
The future is now
wongarsu 7y ago
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.

kotojo 7y ago

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

vsareto 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Couldn't Google and Amazon just do the same?
  - freehunter 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
  - danielbarla 7y ago
    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. [1] https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor https://github.com/Microsoft/monaco-editor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Gamma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Gamma

asenna 7y ago

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

nessunodoro 7y ago
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.
freehunter 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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
- balls187 7y ago
  Ran into that same bug as well. Was excited to give iPadOS a try with the accessibility features. Seems like an error in Safari not honoring the 3rd Party Cookie setting.

drej 7y ago

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

ChrisSD 7y ago

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

skohan 7y ago
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?
- dannyw 7y ago
  The threat of GitLab.
- userbinator 7y ago
  IMHO as long as Github still provides a git interface, that shouldn't be a problem.
  - skohan 7y ago
    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.
    - thrower123 7y ago
      Nobody is going to let them go back to TFS. Git has won, for good or for bad.
      - skohan 7y ago
        Git == GitHub for many, many developers. I wouldn't count it out as a possibility.
- 7y ago

devtanna 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- userbinator 7y ago
  It's also pretty much a security and privacy nightmare.
- dogma1138 7y ago
  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.
- balls187 7y ago
  > 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.
joecot 7y ago
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. https://aka.ms/vso-docs/vscode/self-hosted https://aka.ms/vso-docs/vscode/self-hosted 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.

misterdata 7y ago

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

dx034 7y ago
I use it regularly and love it. It's surprisingly easy to set up and works well with Chrome & Firefox.
xienze 7y ago
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

StanAngeloff 7y ago

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).

manigandham 7y ago
It's in preview. Firefox is coming: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsonline/issues/34 https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsonline/issues/34 Check the prev discussion that has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442088
- ecf 7y ago
  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”.
  - jedieaston 7y ago
    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.
7y ago

factorialboy 7y ago

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

manigandham 7y ago
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?
- tsukurimashou 7y ago
  ask google :^)
- saiya-jin 7y ago
  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).
- diffeomorphism 7y ago
  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...
- donmcronald 7y ago
  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."

taude 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
dx034 7y ago
Code-Server[1] already offers that based on VSCode. It's hostable on-prem, works out-of-the-box and free to use. [1] https://github.com/cdr/code-server https://github.com/cdr/code-server

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dwniydc2hkynuzh 7y ago

God help us

tasogare 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

manigandham 7y ago

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 7y ago
I was hoping for some first hand impressions from it but no, its basically just a re-hosted press announcement.

rb808 7y ago

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 7y ago
Is it really not powerful enough, or is it just not possible to setup a decent dev environment because of the Google lock?
- bergie 7y ago
  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.
- rb808 7y ago
  Google lock is a big part of it, though Crostini looks to fix that. The main part is though most Chromebooks have low powered processors like Celerons, which is great for price, battery life, weight and heat.

twodave 7y ago

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.

trpc 7y ago

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.

jbigelow76 7y ago

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.

GnarfGnarf 7y ago

Time to find alternatives: Qt, Qt Creator.

seanwilson 7y ago

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.

signal11 7y ago
Great point about powerful/expensive laptops. 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.
sorenjan 7y ago
It's probably great for border crossings into countries that demands to look through your private data, like the US and Canada.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> 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!

thrower123 7y ago

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.

IGotThroughIt 7y ago

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.

kexx 7y ago
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)
nicoburns 7y ago
> due to electrons memory hogging issues a while back. You realise VSCode is also electron based, right?
- IGotThroughIt 7y ago
  Noticed it almost instantly and edited. You probably didn't see the edit due to hn's caching.
  - sillysaurusx 7y ago
    There’s no caching for logged-in users. Not that it takes away from your point, I just love how the codebase is designed.

TheRealDunkirk 7y ago

"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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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,

mark_l_watson 7y ago

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.

yzh 7y ago

Reminds me of Google's cider-ide: https://code.google.com/archive/p/cider-ide/ https://code.google.com/archive/p/cider-ide/

shireboy 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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

bob1029 7y ago

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 7y ago
I think you get a VM in Azure that checks out your Github repo and installs the necessary dependencies.

nikon 7y ago

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

datashow 7y ago

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?

bullen 7y ago

I started on making my own web IDE: http://edit.rupy.se http://edit.rupy.se "Will finish it before I die, maybe."TM

MasterScrat 7y ago

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-world.html https://masterscrat.github.io/2007/11/20/metacoding-hello-wo...