Visual Studio online available for public preview
visualstudio.microsoft.com
visualstudio.microsoft.com
Let us know if you have any questions/comments/feedback, since we’re very keen to begin working with the broader developer community, and learning how we can continue to improve. Otherwise, check out the service (https://aka.ms/vso), and then let us know what you think (https://GitHub.com/microsoftdocs/vsonline).
Original post read: They linked directly to the GitHub repo in the post with a LICENSE in it.
Does the platform support that? Or wants to?
What I would like to stop a comment thread and jump to online-video-session to review some code. Live Share works but requires a stable environment by one of the parties which might be troublesome with some code.
We have a lot more to do in order to make this scenario truly shine, but we’re very excited about the possibilities moving forward. I’d love to hear more about your specific thoughts on PR reviews, and what kind of workflow your team would find compelling.
a) People not currently working on a repo (don't have a local build environment setup) and do tweaks and suggest improvements (e.g. add a unit test to prove make a bug clear) in a async way.
b) A tech lead/senior developer can request the author to join a live session to go explain the whole PR has a bad approach or misses a base guideline on the repo. Not sure on this case how a summary of review session should be added (maybe the PR should have a log of review sessions done).
c) A teach lead takes the PR has an opportunity to ask the whole team to join a review so that he can point out a recurring issues on the repo or to just align ideas on code quality.
Regarding requirements, you could absolutely run the web editor from a Chromebook! Being able to utilize low-powered devices, while using real-world dev tools, is something we’re excited to enable with this service.
Reusing the name of a past product for a new product that is not entirely related is pretty confusing.
https://www.google.com/search?q=vso
vs code doesn't appear anywhere, however you would have totally owned this:
OK. What you wrote on that web site, "run, and debug your applications from any device", reads like a false advertisement.
I do CAD/CAM/CAE, for that I need a physical GPU. I do embedded, for that I need custom physical hardware, running specific build of Linux. I do multimedia, for that I need a physical GPU with all their hardware codecs. I do GPGPU, same thing.
Maybe you should specify which types of applications are actually supported?
That said, we can definitely make sure to be clearer about where we’re at in our journey towards enabling this promise more broadly. Apologies for the confusion!
In the meantime, we also allow registering your own machines with the service, since we’ll never be able to provide all of the customized environments that devs need. With this “self-hosted environment”, you can benefit from the remote tooling experience (including the web editor), with your own compute. I’d love to hear if this would be helpful for you and your specific workloads.
Hmm, for embedded that would be ARM Linux. Even if you'll support the platform, would be slow.
> I’d love to hear if this would be helpful for you and your specific workloads.
Probably not. I don't like latency, you probably don't have an Azure DC in or near western Balkans.
Even ignoring latency, I don't like clouds in general. Unreliable, often overpriced, aggressive marketing.
This could be an immediate hit if I could click on a button in Github to open that repo in it with the environment all setup.
I never had anything but problems with my Microsoft and Azure accounts because of confusing UX. If I have to deal with live.microsoft.com I won’t use it. But, if you let me login with GitHub I might try it out. I don’t want to link my GitHub account. I want that to be the primary account used to access VS Live.
I’m guessing that won’t happen though since you’ll want everyone to be ready to use Azure.
"Presently, running the "Register" command via a full instance of VS Code is the only supported flow, but the scenario you described of hosting a server without a GUI is on the product roadmap."
I can register my local VSCode just fine. When I connect to a remote ssh connection, and try to register that environment, I get a prompt telling me "Failed to register local environment: Install the Azure Account extension". When I look up that extension, I can install it in the SSH environment, but I get the same error still.
[1] In ~/.bashrc: PATH=$PATH:/opt/oryx:/opt/nodejs/lts/bin:/opt/dotnet/sdks/lts
[2] ``` Source directory : /home/vsonline/workspace
Using .NET Core SDK Version: 3.0.100
Restoring packages...
Welcome to .NET Core 3.0! ```
[3] ``` /opt/dotnet/sdks/2.1.802/sdk/2.1.802/Sdks/Microsoft.NET.Sdk/targets/Microsoft.NET.TargetFrameworkInference.targets(137,5): error NETSDK1045: The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET Core 3.0. Either target .NET Core 2.1 or lower, or use a version of the .NET SDK that supports .NET Core 3.0 ```
So this is NOT Visual Studio but rather VSCode? Do you have insight into why Microsoft keeps making misleading product names? Would it be so horrible to name it VSCode Online instead of Visual Studio Online?
> Let us know if you have any questions
The website says "Use the programming languages and frameworks of your choice". Will that include building and debugging C++ Win32 MFC applications?
Then later made a new thing called .NET Core which was the same as .NET Framework but more multi platform. Which was confusing so they came up with .NET Standard which was an interface describing compatibility between the other two .NETs
They have their top people working on the .NET jit and compiler, and the VS Code editor. None left for naming conventions.
C ++
++https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/visual-studio-on...
Well I just tried it and it's aimed at the feel of VSCode.
>Microsoft keeps making misleading product names
What's with the hostility?
Trying to work in this world, and keep up with what I'm supposed to be using for the platform and application in question. As programmers, we expect some level of complexity, but when Microsoft's lead tech evangelist feels the need to make multiple posts to explain the situation with the product lines, it might have gotten a little out of hand.
Is there a stand-alone that I can host and run in a cloud vm myself?
Is there any guidance on what I would need to do to support VSO? Do I need to do anything?
I'm a bit concerned that it sounds like I have to pay in order to write/test environments. Do you not think this will be a barrier to adoption?
>Let us know if you have any questions/comments/feedback
1) Shortcut keys. I hit some shortcut during my hello world testing that didn't have the expected effect (because browser). Given how keyboard heavy developing is are there any plans on unifying this more somehow - VS / VSC / VSO?
2) I gather this is still free, but I assume this will be running off azure credits later?
3) The machines seemed a little heavy spec'd for me. Powerful is nice & a big draw card for cloud. But for my personal use case (casual python) I can see the sweet spot being lower.
4) Please fix the permission request wordings on first launch. Very awkwardly phrased & still not entirely sure what it was asking. It was asking for maintaining some mystery permissions when I'm not online or some such thing?
5) Will GPU instances be available?
Thanks
For #3, we’ll be adding a “Basic” SKU soon, that includes 2 cores and 4 GB RAM. Would that be sufficient for your use cases? You can track the progress of this enhancement here: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsonline/issues/54.
#4: Thanks for the feedback! I’ll look into improving that text this week.
#5: Yep! You can track the progress of this enhancement here: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/vsonline/issues/192.
We should not condone luring people into reliance on closed proprietary technology with "free tiers".
It would be great if people organized and got Intellectual Property thoroughly de-legitimized.
The Chinese economy doesn't have intellectual property restrictions to speak of, would you prefer that economy? (everything is a copy of a copy of a copy and most of it is terrible)
How do specialist tools get created, things of high value which take a lot of work to produce and have only a small number of users?
We use money and restrictions on property to allocate resources, if you take that away there is still allocation, but is it always better? (say, squabbling wikipedia or stackoverflow zealots)
2. The Chinese economy actually has plenty of IP restrictions (e.g. Huawei is very keen on patents); and China is a signatory to the Berne convention. Some Chinese corporations may have failed to observe it, but this is not legal.
3. How would specialist tools get created? Depends on whether the economy is more Capitalist or less so. Maybe large corporations need those tools and will put money into consortia which produce them. Maybe there are lots of small organizations, public/state organs, and/or individual artisans/professionals which need them - so either they pool resources, or the government funds such projects. If the economy is not money-based, then it's a different kettle of fish.
I wish I could simply say a new variable or function and have it inserted.
Whether you’re working on a long-term project, a short-lived feature branch, or want to quickly review a pull request, Visual Studio Online can help you be more productive by providing a fully configured development environment in minutes. By pointing to a Git repo, Visual Studio Online sets up everything you need to focus on being productive:
* Source code
* Runtimes
* Linters & debuggers
* ExtensionsI think some people see value in it as a security feature, or ease of development environment setup. There are also collaborative code editing features. You can both get into a file and type in it at the same time. You can get into your project and work on it from any machine, anywhere, even a phone, potentially.
Personally though, I would never take a job where you do most of your coding in the cloud.
That's a pretty compelling reason for me. There are some projects (like Chrome, Firefox, or even OpenSceneGraph) that aren't trivial to compile entirely from source. It would be pretty sweet to have a ready-to-build environment with the project and all dependencies one click away.
I wouldn't mind having that as an option though. Like, laptop in for repair, use the online dev environment. Traveling and have to fix a critical bug, hop on the cloud environment.
Web-assembly might help some here; it should be possible for the devs to split this up, depending on the tasks, to client and serverside, maybe depending on your computer specs and on the requirements of the task at hand. That should fix the latency for tasks that need to be instant (code completion) and tasks that can be a few seconds/minutes (compiling/packing). I am aware these are mixed tasks while developing so clever use should be made of what can be done locally and what should be done remotely.
I recently transitioned to office 365 a year or two ago. Boy that was a huge mistake. Even though I still have 5 shares available, apparently they require office 365 users to login once a month, or they'll lock you out of your own software. Which makes zero sense because since I still have shares, there's not really a viable way to abuse that.
This recently screwed me during the PG&E shutoffs and easily cost me $1000 in downtime for me and my team.
I thought you were going with a Platonic parable here, but then you threw in IE 11 into the mix :-(
The use case for VSCode Online is the same as any other remote development environment, combine it with deployment workflows and or integrated services like Azure and it practically sells itself. Just like Slack the secret sauce here isn't the service itself, it is how it ties into everything else.
One quite significant difference though; portability.
Also not quite $1000s; $800 for the ipad (and a $400 one would do fine) and $20/mo for the mac. Beats a mbp most of the time in a modern 4g/wifi environment. Ofcourse there are many caveats; embedded programming, game programming, mobile app testing etc. But I still do about 60-70% (depending) on it; it's great for building / testing / deploying API's and some months that's all I do.
I'm struggling to think of something else though. It sure feels like forward thinking.
(Got a 2nd hand 2016 zenbook instead - wohoo 3200 x 1800 res)
https://dev.to/svenefftinge/continuous-dev-environments-the-...
(Disclaimer: I work on gitpod.io which is similar to Visual Studio Online)
If there were a "scene" around nixpkgs the way there is around apt PPAs, everyone could just put a shell.nix in their Githubs and onboarding would be instant. Still, I wish someone would get behind a FOSS project like nixpkgs.
The same as Amazon cloud9, and other online IDE, it's about not having to install any SDK on your own computer to develop apps, which is really handy in the era of cheap SSD laptops and mobility.
I have used cloud9 for years, unfortunately the editor itself hasn't had a real update for a long time. So VS online is a welcome addition.
Congrats to the VSO team at Microsoft.
- docker-compose support
- ability to run multiple services from different repos
- No documentation on how to clone a private github repo, gitlab repo, etc.
- Cloning a private repo on the command line eschews the ability to bootstrap your VSO instance using the in-repo config, which kills a huge benefit of this product
- No documentation on forwarding ssh-agent or injecting RSA keys of any kind
There are some other needs addressed in other comment threads (particularly registering a remote headless box as a VSO machine) but the above are instant showstoppers. Perhaps this works with private Azure DevOps repos because of the login integration? I'd be willing to wager that the majority of folks interested in this are on other repo hosts, though.
I said thank you and compiled everything with MINGW on Linux. Apt installed mingw in 30 seconds. And no pain with perl script to create VS solutions, import and configure them, same cmake build works just fine.