Microsoft’s web-based version of Visual Studio

Techcrunch article is crummy, just click to the official page or read the big discussion from yesterday: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21442088" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21442088</a><p>Summary: &quot;<i>Visual Studio Online provides cloud-powered development environments for any activity - whether it&#x27;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&#x27;s accessible anywhere! You can even connect your own self-hosted environments to Visual Studio Online at no cost.</i>&quot;

I&#x27;ll admit this, I was wrong about Satya. I didn&#x27;t think Microsoft was salvageable but he&#x27;s been doing a stellar job. He&#x27;s a great CEO and embracing open source was a really good move.<p>I shifted to VSCode from atom (before they purchased github) due to atom&#x27;s memory hogging issues a while back. Haven&#x27;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&#x27;ve been trying that out lately. If I like it, I&#x27;ll stick with it.<p>Also, all my code is hosted on Azure now from AWS since late last year.<p>I tried WSL but didn&#x27;t like it to due problems with paths but at this rate with which they&#x27;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&#x27;t run away from Ms&#x2F;Windows environment fast enough.

I want to like this, but having no support for Firefox, no SLA during the preview[1] &amp; being unable to figure out the pricing model[2] makes that very difficult.<p>[1] How safe are my projects and what guarantees do I get that my work won&#x27;t be lost?<p>[2] <i>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).</i>

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.

I think people are missing the point that these cloud IDEs mean you don&#x27;t need to be nearby or carry around a powerful + expensive laptop to work.<p>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.<p>I&#x27;ve been in situations where I&#x27;ve travelled to some place where I don&#x27;t want to bring my expensive work laptop (e.g. want to travel light, the weather is awful, it&#x27;s a sketchy area), and had my work laptop break randomly a couple of days before a big deadline where I couldn&#x27;t wait for it to get repaired.

&quot;I don&#x27;t get it.&quot; &lt;&#x2F;Tom Hanks, in Big&gt;<p>There&#x27;s no stack I work in for which a single program is enough to get things done, even if it&#x27;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&#x27;re locked up in a cloud service without a filesystem? Maybe this works for a pull-request review and merge, but I can&#x27;t see it being useful for any more than that.

On one hand, this is a pretty easy move to make because of what VSCode already is.<p>On the other hand, I don&#x27;t actually switch contexts that often to warrant switching to a web IDE full-time.<p>It will be handy and used for quick edits, but I don&#x27;t buy their sales pitch. Hopefully they don&#x27;t try to go too far with this to the detriment of the VSCode or start offering web-only features.

Similar to devs feeling the need to develop against a local kubernetes cluster I guess I&#x27;m too old (and I&#x27;m not that old!) to see the practical problem being solved with Visual Studio Online versus the marketing problem we&#x27;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&#x27;s just never seemed necessary to spin up ENTIRE environments for what should be isolated changes, it&#x27;s pretty easy to test against an already running integration environment.

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

Microsoft naming question: Is this a completely different product or is it the next iteration of visual studio?<p>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.

You can actually spin up your own web-based VSCode using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cdr&#x2F;code-server" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cdr&#x2F;code-server</a>.

Here is the actual Microsoft release details page. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;visualstudio.microsoft.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;visual-studio-online&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;visualstudio.microsoft.com&#x2F;services&#x2F;visual-studio-on...</a>

Previous discussion, including a Q&amp;A with the VS Online PM: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21442088" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21442088</a>

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.<p>I understand Microsoft probably has a fantastical vision of &quot;everything through visual studio&quot;, 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&#x2F;review&#x2F;merge&#x2F;pull cycle) is a total deal-breaker for me. Sometimes I&#x27;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&#x2F;GitHub or some other cloud-bound dystopia.<p>This said, I love Microsoft and everything they have been doing around the .NET ecosystem lately. It has been going really well. Let&#x27;s not start making bad choices now...

Where this gets interesting is where this and projects like Eclipse Che [1] are self-hosted in companies that have or want to have dev workflow where the source code doesn&#x27;t leave a locked environment (no source allowed on dev&#x27;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&#x27;s cool to see advancements in web-based code editing.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eclipse.org&#x2F;che&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eclipse.org&#x2F;che&#x2F;</a>

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

I&#x27;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&#x2F;MonoDevelop with some paint and extensions.<p>It&#x27;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&#x27;s not quite the same thing.

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

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.<p>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.

I&#x27;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:<p>* Your every-day laptop can be lighter and have less &quot;development cruft&quot;. It&#x27;s email, office, and a browser.<p>* You can upgrade&#x2F;swap out&#x2F;use multiple laptops and desktops without losing dev environment<p>* If you do it right, you can spin up a new dev environment with little effort. I just run &quot;.&#x2F;install-devapps.ps1&quot;, which runs a bunch of Chocolatey installs, and have a new VM in a few minutes.<p>One thing I&#x27;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&#x27;d rather not spin up Azure SQL for every dev project, but I&#x27;m wondering if Microsoft might want me to ;)

I would like to try this but don’t have an account.<p>Years ago, a company had a very good Haskell web IDE, that I liked very much, but they phased out support for it.<p>Internally at Google, they also have a fantastic all web dev environment.<p>It is possible, and having a lot of cloud “muscle” for fast builds and tests makes up for some inconvenience.

My kid now has a Chromebook for school, I&#x27;m pretty impressed, lightweight, amazing battery life, good Lenovo keyboard, screen could be better. It isn&#x27;t powerful enough to do dev work, but with something like this terminal-like laptops could be perfect for dev work.

Brings back memory... 12 years ago we built an online IDE with a friend, you could actually edit and build C&#x2F;C++&#x2F;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.<p>Demo: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lumakey.net&#x2F;labs&#x2F;metacoding&#x2F;Editor&#x2F;Demo.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lumakey.net&#x2F;labs&#x2F;metacoding&#x2F;Editor&#x2F;Demo.htm</a><p>Blog post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;masterscrat.github.io&#x2F;2007&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;metacoding-hello-world.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;masterscrat.github.io&#x2F;2007&#x2F;11&#x2F;20&#x2F;metacoding-hello-wo...</a>

That really looks like more than 79 characters per line.

I started on making my own web IDE: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;edit.rupy.se" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;edit.rupy.se</a><p>&quot;Will finish it before I die, maybe.&quot;TM

Anyone else getting stuck creating an environment? &quot;NewResourceGroupAlreadyExists&quot; when I try to create a billing plan. Tried editing the things under &quot;Advanced&quot; to be unique, to no avail.<p>Edit: was on my org account. using a personal account works great.

What if my project involves processing lots of data files (not databases), do I also need to move data files to the cloud?<p>For example, if my project needs to process thousands of csv and xls files, will I be able to do everything in the cloud?

Reminds me of Google&#x27;s cider-ide: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.google.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;p&#x2F;cider-ide&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;code.google.com&#x2F;archive&#x2F;p&#x2F;cider-ide&#x2F;</a>

This is great, but how can I use the self-hosted solution? it&#x27;s advertised in their website but couldn&#x27;t find anything in the docs.

Time to find alternatives: Qt, Qt Creator.

God help us

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

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