Microsoft’s web-based version of Visual Studio
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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 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.
It just hit me that since GitHub was bought, both VSCode and Atom are owned by Microsoft.
And somehow Windows still doesn't ship with a decent text editor out of the box...
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?
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 looks exactly the same as the one in Windows XP :D
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.
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.
I'm on a Mac, and I love the app - never even use the built-in Mac text editor.
What kind of Mac are you on?
How long does it take for you to load VSCode or Sublime?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-insider/at-home/wha...
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.
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.
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.
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.
You have limited experience in a huge piece of the enterprise / government world if you think this would ever fly - and they all run windows
- 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.
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.
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.
That's an odd way of putting "have been winning so hard for so long that they probably can't even lose now if they tried".
...unless of course you mean the server OS wars, in which case that statement is a lot less wrong.
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.
I'm really looking forward to WSL2 though.
My condolences about living with
* spending ~20% of traffic for telemetry
* bloatware/low quality updates
* unexpected reboots after system upgrade
* non-removable Sugar Bob game in Windows Pro(!) edition
Sorry, but all this crap doesn't makes MS "good" in any sense.
What platform is perfect?
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.
Pi-Hole is blocking about 10% of traffic overall.
Then again, which OS is much better on all fronts? Still have to see it, and I tried/use a lot of them.
Telemetry can be blocked through a firewall.
In fairness the reboots after updates is kind of expected these days. I'm always surprised when I don't have to reboot.
I don't have a Sugar Bob game on my pro edition.
I don't even know what that is.
Was not aware of this. Very good to know.
[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).
Check the prev discussion that has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442088
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”.
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.
So, 2 years of developpement cost the price of a nice laptop, which you need anyway to access the cloud.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/visual-stu...
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.
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 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.
Different regions have different prices, parent selected East US.
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.
PS - HK needs a version history/edited marker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You already don't need to do this! Just RDP into your workstation. Christ, we've been doing it since the 90s people!
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.
Example from 2012: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/swap-your-laptop-ipad-l...
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.
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.
Years ago, I'd have called myself a dying breed, but I don't think thats true,
This might be a bit of an assumption :)
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.
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.
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 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Gamma
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.
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
Rider is rock solid and basically has Resharper included and has better extensions.
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
ITEM_URL=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.
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...
Should be possible, but in my experience it’s just not right now.
Seems like an error in Safari not honoring the 3rd Party Cookie setting.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
* 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 ;)
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.
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
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.
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.
But indeed, cheap Chromebooks are not that fast, so running tests etc remotely can be a good option there.
The main part is though most Chromebooks have low powered processors like Celerons, which is great for price, battery life, weight and heat.
Demo: http://lumakey.net/labs/metacoding/Editor/Demo.htm
Blog post: https://masterscrat.github.io/2007/11/20/metacoding-hello-wo...
Our code standard has a 150 character max line length, with the formatter trying for 120. That's working out quite well for us.
"Will finish it before I die, maybe."TM
Edit: was on my org account. using a personal account works great.
For example, if my project needs to process thousands of csv and xls files, will I be able to do everything in the cloud?
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...
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).