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Microsoft Programming IT

Microsoft's Visual Studio Online Code Editor is Now Visual Studio Codespaces and Gets a Price Drop (techcrunch.com) 24

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
About a year ago, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online, its online code editor based on the popular Visual Studio Code project. It')s basically a full code editor and hosted environment that lives in your browser. Today, the company announced that it is changing the name of this service to Visual Studio Codespaces. It's also dropping the price of the service by more than 50% and giving developers the option to run it on relatively low-performance virtual machines that will start at $0.08 per hour. In today's announcement, Microsoft's Scott Hanselman points out that the company learned that most developers who used Visual Studio Online thought of it as being much more than simply an editor in the browser.
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Microsoft's Visual Studio Online Code Editor is Now Visual Studio Codespaces and Gets a Price Drop More

Microsoft's Visual Studio Online Code Editor is Now Visual Studio Codespaces and Gets a Price Drop

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  • what, why? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Why would I pay an hourly rate to use an IDE when VS Code, VS Community Edition, Eclipse, Atom, Sublime, and even advanced "text editors" like Kate or Notepad++ are all free?

    I really don't see the logic here.

    • I'm still waiting for something better than Emacs. (*waits and listens for the stampede of people rushing to disagree*)

      • It was called Brief, and it came out in the 80's.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sconeu ( 64226 )

        The only reason to use Emacs is because of C-x M-c M-butterfly.

      • It would help you get detractors if you explained why you think Emacs is better! I'm sure it works well for the things you do, and because you know it well! In my experience, it is slow and crash-prone.

        Here are some things that set Visual Studio apart:
        - Edit and continue lets you change compiled code while debugging, and continue debugging the updated code, without restarting your application or rebuilding it. This feature saves me countless hours! This is so important that I'm not interested in any IDE tha

        • Gdb can do the last. And I don't do javascript or Windows.

          • Well then that explains why you don't need to move on from Emacs!

            • Well then that explains why you don't need to move on from Emacs!

              I've used visual studio in the past (for an embedded system) as a build system and it was very difficult to use, very typical of Microsoft products. I have used some IDEs but I have not liked any since UCSD Pascal back in 1982. Problems I have:

              - Cramming too much into a single tool in a single window is inefficient and clumsy.
              - I have not seen support for multiple editing windows in an IDE; ie, not tabs like a brower, but windows that can be side to side. The MDI model is terrible, it means all your wind

              • It seems it's been a while since you tried Visual Studio. It has had all kinds of tab and docking options for editor windows for a number of years. Editor windows can be inside the parent frame, or be popped outside and sized or arranged however you want.

                Muscle memory, I get that!

                Requiring projects is, in my opinion, a good way to force programmers to "declare" that a file is part of the application. There's no guessing "should this file be in here?" If you are combining source files from disparate folders

                • "Tabs" are not what I want.

                  You declare that a file is a part of the application (or firmware or hardware, etc) by modifying the build script or build tool. The IDE shouldn't be the final step of product builds, as most of them don't take well to being automated on the backoffice server (especially if that's a linux VM as many are these days). Some IDEs can export makefiles, but they're often very crappy. For one product I was on the build engineer had to manually click a few buttons to build one small comp

                  • In Visual Studio, the "project" file IS the make file. This has the added advantage that, if you take it out of your project, you automatically take it out of your build.

                    Visual Studio projects build just fine on back office servers, using either the devenv.exe or msbuild.exe command lines. For those of us who have moved to .NET Core, this works on Linux too. In either case, there is no need to create a separate makefile, your makefile is your project file. It contains all of the dependency information that

    • I'm guessing if you're on a *really* low end machine that can't run Visual Studio Code (based on Electron), but you CAN run Chrome/chromium?

      I ... aw hell man, who knows. Sounds like someone said "hey, I bet we could do this" and some product manager saw a way to justify his salary?

    • Cloud, my friend...just follow the logic of the Cloud.

    • These are all locally installed software.

      The rate is not for using the IDE, but for hosting the IDE.

      You don't see the logic because you are asking the wrong question: Why would you want to have a server hosted IDE?

      You may want that if the rest of your Code Repo, CI/CD, test and prod runtime and everything else is server hosted, too.

      If not, you probably don't want that.

  • Who the fuck would pay for this? I see they dropped the price.
    • As a consultant, it does allows us to work in the customer's environment (in Azure or in their on-prem) but still use our local machines. All the code, etc, works in their network and we no longer need slow VPN's or crappy Citrix remote connections.

    • Schools. That would be one way to make sure every student is using the same IDE and the same lesson plan.

    • You see they dropped the price? How? Because it was in the post's title perhaps?

  • When SaaS started getting attention... like... 10 or 15 years ago, I'd always come back at advocates with "I can't use my word processor. The network is down". There's no good answer to that, and there's no good answer for an online IDE either. Neither of these applications is inherently network oriented. It may come as a shock to people who were raised in an "always" connected world, but lots of things are inherently not oriented towards networks, and IDEs are certainly one of those things. SaaS was,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lennie ( 16154 )

      While I agree, I'm certain one reason for all this is: to connect to services already running 'in the cloud', a lot of the times larger than fit on your laptop.

      Did you know web applications these days can have working offline mode ? So in theory they could do it correctly.

      And yes, they love to sell services.

      It's interesting to see Microsoft create FOSS software and then create a product/service from it.

      I guess it's the combination of the 'one hit is free' / open core model.

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