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Comment by shireboy | Hacker News Reader

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 ;)

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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.

I develop mostly ASP.NET + SQL apps for a living, with some Ionic mobile and other stuff thrown in.

I use my MSDN Azure benefit (~$150/mo) to spin up an F4 VM instance with the latest Visual Studio Community base image. I have a disk separate from OS where I keep code, databases, and some powershell to use Chocolatey to install my dev tools. (everything is also in source control, but this separates data from OS and makes spinning up a new VM easier). I RDP into it and do all my work via remote desktop. Cost is ~75$/mo (out of the 150), depending on how much I work. If I leave the VM up all night it costs more. I use the build in Auto-shutdown to help with this.

I haven't tinkered with the new options to use VS Code over SSH, but RDP is working just fine in general. The one issue I can run into is if my client wants on-prem, it can be hard to publish to their production environments. In those cases, I usually resort to "cut and paste deployment".

I use a Surface Pro as my desktop, and it has mRemoteNg (a great remote desktop organizing tool), Office, and Chrome. I do have VS Code on it for one-off stuff, but no SQL Server Express, VS full, etc. as I always found those slowed down my PC. I also keep a chocolatey script for installing desktop apps when I get new hardware.

The end result is both desktop and dev environments are fairly disposable and portable.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other ?s

Not the parent, but I've looked into this and here's my take.

1. Yes RDP 2. The cost can vary obviously, but let's take a lower-end 4vcore 16GB Windows VM (B4MS) - $29.12 (160 hours per month of usage) 3. 512GB of SSD storage - $38.40 a month

It's not a bad setup if you need flexibility to scale up your VM.

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