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Visual Studio online available for public preview

visualstudio.microsoft.com

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Re: Visual Studio online available for public preview

#91

Post by Havoc »

lostintangent wrote: post #6

Hey All! I’m a PM on the Visual Studio Online team (as well as Live Share and IntelliCode), and we’re extremely excited to have more developers try out the product. Our goal is to dramatically reduce the cost of setup/onboarding, enable better team/classroom collaboration, and further support remote development. We believe that having on-demand, cloud-powered dev environments, that are accessible from VS Code and the…

Excited about this.

>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

Re: Visual Studio online available for public preview

#92

Post by aphistic »

lostintangent wrote: post #71
joecot wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there documentation somewhere for the self-hosted environment option, which according to the product landing page and pricing page is no cost? I'm guessing the flow there is to use VSCode through the online site, but give ssh credentials to one of your servers that's running the Remote SSH VSCode environment. But once I go to Create an Environment, there's no option for a self-hosted one.

Yep! Check out this doc and let us know if you have any questions/feedback: https://aka.ms/vso-docs/vscode/self-hosted .

I looked at that page and I just wanted to clarify something for myself. Does this mean you can't do a headless server since you need VS Code and some plugins? I like the idea and it would definitely be a strong argument to go back to VS Code but I was hoping I could just run some kind of server on a terminal-only VM.

Re: Visual Studio online available for public preview

#93

Post by greggyb »

gameswithgo wrote: post #79
ebg13 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Visual Studio Online team...VS Code... 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++ Wi…

This is from the company that came up with .NET to describe an intermediate bytecode and runtime. 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 edi…

My favorite is their cloud platform, Azure, named after the color of a clear blue sky.

Re: Visual Studio online available for public preview

#94

Post by chuxel »

lostintangent wrote: post #88
Dayshine wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm the author of a niche language server extension ( https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tboby.cw... ). 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?

Your extension should “just work”. And yes, we have a self-hosted environment solution that you can use to test out your extension in the web, and it’s entirely free: https://aka.ms/vso-docs/vscode/self-hosted .

If you run into trouble, we've also expanded the Remote Development extension guide in VS Code documentation to cover Visual Studio Online as well: https://aka.ms/vso-docs/developing-extensions

Re: Visual Studio online available for public preview

#95

Post by DoubleFree »

AlexeyBrin wrote: post #36

It would be great if there would be a free tier for people that want to learn C++ with VS. Something that lets you use VS online for small C++ programs (similar with Compiler Explorer but with support for running the generated binary) to build and run these small programs.

Compiler explorer actually supports running the binary now!

Re: Visual Studio online available for public preview

#96

Post by z3t4 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #27
windsurfer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other remote development environments exist? I can only think of cloud9.

Nano/vim/emacs/etc over a remote (SSH) terminal, remote VM, or remote session via other means (e.g. VNC/RDC/etc). People use Visual Studio itself remotely via VMs and RDC.

Or any editor/IDE via ssh -X (the window's show locally while the app runs on the server)

Re: Visual Studio online available for public preview

#97

Post by Enginerrrd »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #11
bouke wrote: post #2

What is the use case for a hosted Visual Studio Code?

Lock-in and future abuse when you can't escape the relationship.

I'm sure there's a value proposition in there somewhere, but looking at the way "software as a service" type models have been abused once users are committed and specifically looking at Microsoft's track record with things like the Zune DRM debacle, I think you'd have to be out of your mind to transition your company or team over to this.

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.

Re: Visual Studio online available for public preview

#98

Post by sterlind »

lobo42 wrote: post #46
bouke wrote: post #2

What is the use case for a hosted Visual Studio Code?

The real killer app is not using an IDE in the browser but using disposable, automated dev environments. I've written a blog post about: https://dev.to/svenefftinge/continuous-dev-environments-the-... (Disclaimer: I work on gitpod.io which is similar to Visual Studio Online)

I use Nix for this. I have a library of building blocks that I import and customize to make `shell.nix` files, and then use nix-shell. Unfortunately, the Nix design patterns (though not the language, really) are esoteric and rather unstable, at the mercy of nixpkgs.

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.

Re: Visual Studio online available for public preview

#99

Post by einpoklum »

colechristensen wrote: post #51
einpoklum wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it would not be great. 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.

What's left? What can you own and control and sell and restrict? 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 propert…

1. Intellectual Property is not about "allocation of resources". IP is not physical property (which is a separate question). IP is the threat of punishment for using or copying information.

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.

Re: Visual Studio online available for public preview

#100

Post by einpoklum »

AlexeyBrin wrote: post #49
einpoklum wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it would not be great. 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.

I prefer a pragmatic solution and I encourage people to test their code with all available major C++ compilers (GCC, Clang and MSVC).

I agree that, as developers, we can't ignore people who use MSVC on Windows. But we shouldn't encourage _this_ kind of initiative, especially among junior developers. They shouldn't be caught in the web of depending on Microsoft for things.
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