Visual Studio Online is finally online
In May of this year, Microsoft announced the Web version of Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio Online, at the Build 2019 Developer Conference. At that time, Microsoft released the Private Preview version, which only allowed developers to apply for trials. At the Microsoft Ignite 2019 conference on November 4th, the public preview version of Visual Studio Online was finally launched.
Intuitively from the page, Visual Studio Online is a web version of the Visual Studio Code, but this is just a front-end interface. This web browser-based editor also supports Git repositories, extensions, and built-in command-line interfaces. Developers can edit, run, and debug applications from any device.
Visual Studio Online based on the Azure cloud platform has several natural advantages:
Remote Development
Visual Studio Online conceptually and technically extends the Visual Studio Code Remote Development extensions. As explained in the Remote Development with VS Code blog post, we built Visual Studio Online because “We saw many developers trying to develop against containers and remote VMs configured with specific development and runtime stacks, simply because it is too hard, too disruptive, and in some cases impossible, to set up these development environments locally. We’ve all experienced this problem. Unless we feel it’s time to flatten that machine, we hesitate to try out a new stack like Rust, Go, Node, or Python3, for fear of ‘messing up’ our current, well-tuned environment.”
Environments
Cloud-hosted development environments come with all of the benefits of the cloud, powered by Azure:
- They are fast to create and disposable. Create as many as you want (up to subscription limits), and throw them away when you’re done. It’s just that easy.
- They are managed, reducing overall maintenance for you.
- They have predictable pricing and you only pay for what you use, with built in auto-suspend to eliminate runoff costs.
- Moving your development workload to the cloud frees up resources on your personal machine to email, chat, stream music, or even to simultaneously work on more projects.
More…
According to the official introduction, whether developers are dealing with long-term projects, short-lived feature branches, or want to quickly view pull requests, you can use Visual Studio Online to complete tasks quickly and efficiently using a fully configured development environment. By pointing to the Git repository, Visual Studio Online sets up all the content you need for developers, allowing developers to focus on improving the efficiency of coding, running, debugging, Linter and extensions.
