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Programming Microsoft

Visual Studio for Browsers: Microsoft Unveils 'VSCode for the Web' (visualstudio.com) 56

Posted by EditorDavid from the bright-IDEs dept.
"Bringing VS Code to the browser is the realization of the original vision for the product," Microsoft said in a blog post. "It is also the start of a completely new one. An ephemeral editor that is available to anyone with a browser and an internet connection is the foundation for a future where we can truly edit anything from anywhere."

Or, as Mike Melanson describes it in his "This Week in Programming" column, "Microsoft continued its march toward developer dominance this week with the launch of Visual Studio Code for the Web, a lightweight version of the company's highly popular (mostly) open source code editor..." Now, before you go getting too excited, VS Code for the Web isn't really a fully-functional version of VS Code running in the browser, as it has no backend to back it up, which means its primary purpose is for client-side HTML, JavaScript, and CSS applications... VS Code for the Web is able to provide syntax colorization, text-based completions and other such features for popular languages such as C/C++, C#, Java, PHP, Rust, and Go, while TypeScript, JavaScript, and Python are "all powered by language services that run natively in the browser" and therefore provide a "better" experience, while those aforementioned Web languages, such as JSON, HTML, CSS, and LESS, will provide the best experience. Extensions, meanwhile — which are among the top reasons for using VS Code — generally work for user interface customizations (and can be synced with your other environments), but, again, not so much for those back-end features.

Caveats aside, VS Code for the Web does, indeed, offer a lightweight, available-anywhere code editor for things like your tablet, your Chromebook, and heck, even your XBOX...

While companies like Amazon and Google seem to be sitting idly by in this arena, Microsoft is not the only company focused on providing remote developer experiences. The Eclipse Foundation, for example, last year offered what it said was "a true open source alternative to Visual Studio Code" with Eclipse Theia, and Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich said he expects this to be just the beginning. "We have been saying for years that the future of developer tools is the browser. Developers already use their browsers for the vast majority of their day-to-day tasks, with code editing being amongst the last to move," Milinkovich wrote in an email. "Microsoft's recent vscode.dev announcement is a recognition of this trend. I expect that every serious cloud vendor will be following suit over the next few quarters."

GitPod, meanwhile, has been hard at work in this very same arena, with its own launch just last month of the open source OpenVSCode Server, which also lets developers run upstream Visual Studio Code in the browser.
Gitpod co-founder Johannes Landgraf calls it "yet another validation that we reached a tipping point of how and where we develop software" — but also more. "Think orchestration and provisioning of compute, operating system, language servers and all other tools you require for professional software development in the cloud."

Melanson's column also argues VS Code for the Web is meant to entice geeks further into the Microsoft development universe. "The next thing you know, you've spent $100 on other things...like GitHub Codespaces, which is, after all, pretty much the same exact thing, except it provides all those back-end services and, more importantly for Microsoft, is not free to use. And more important still, once you've got all those developers fully hooked on VS Code, Codespaces, GitHub, and the rest of it, Azure isn't too far down the line now, is it?"
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Visual Studio for Browsers: Microsoft Unveils 'VSCode for the Web' More

Visual Studio for Browsers: Microsoft Unveils 'VSCode for the Web'

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  • copied functionality poorly implemented (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Saturday October 23, 2021 @12:44PM (#61920269) Journal

    If you're going to make an IDE for the browser, why make a copy of what already exists on the desktop? Why not take full advantage of the opportunities a browser offers?

    If I'm going to use a browser as an IDE, I want it like Squeak/Smalltalk [squeak.org], where the IDE is so integrated that you can right-click any UI element and modify its code there on the spot. Innovation has gone seriously downhill since then.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm very skeptical of cloud programming. You're basically handing Microsoft zero-day access to your internal intellectual property. Why should Microsoft be given the priviledge of snooping on EVERYBODY's code? Even if you're coding an open source app, why should Microsoft be given access to steal your ideas and put them in their own proprietary products before you ever get to a releasable state?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dnaumov ( 453672 )

        I'm very skeptical of cloud programming. You're basically handing Microsoft zero-day access to your internal intellectual property. Why should Microsoft be given the priviledge of snooping on EVERYBODY's code? Even if you're coding an open source app, why should Microsoft be given access to steal your ideas and put them in their own proprietary products before you ever get to a releasable state?

        Lots of highly regulated businesses and goverments do use Azure, you understand this, right?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by znrt ( 2424692 )

          i think a more pressing question is do you understand this?

        • I'm very skeptical of cloud programming. You're basically handing Microsoft zero-day access to your internal intellectual property. Why should Microsoft be given the priviledge of snooping on EVERYBODY's code? Even if you're coding an open source app, why should Microsoft be given access to steal your ideas and put them in their own proprietary products before you ever get to a releasable state?

          Lots of highly regulated businesses and goverments do use Azure, you understand this, right?

          Because Azure (and other cloud vendors) offer a FIPS certified environment, thus meeting the mandatory tickbox requirements for government work. Your desktop PC doesn't offer that. The ones that do are suboptimal in multiple ways.

        • Sure, same as Solarwinds.

      • I'm very skeptical of cloud programming. You're basically handing Microsoft zero-day access to your internal intellectual property. Why should Microsoft be given the priviledge of snooping on EVERYBODY's code? Even if you're coding an open source app, why should Microsoft be given access to steal your ideas and put them in their own proprietary products before you ever get to a releasable state?

        Microsoft used to be anti-competitive jerks, but they're not really known for pasting other people's code.

        They're more well known for writing their own version, years late, and botching it.

        • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

          by MightyMartian ( 840721 )

          Let me get out my guitar and sing you the story of Stacker

          • Put your guitar away, your character sheets says clown, not bard. In any case, Stac Software sued Microsoft for patent infringement, not anything about code.
            And it was Microsoft that won the counter-suit about stolen trade secrets, which is closer to the issue here.
            Look up how many programmers Microsoft hires. If they want code, they just write it. Look at all their bugs! They're allergic to stealing code. They're not pathologically honest, they're pathologically arrogant.

      • Microsoft absolutely does not snoop on customer data. There are so many levels of protections in place to prevent this, to the point that it makes the job of support difficult. Microsoft actually cares about privacy.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • you can right-click any UI element and modify its code there on the spot.

      What does that action mean in the context of writing software for embedded systems, an AI app, or a web search engine? You do realize that not everyone works in Javascript and HTML, right? Right?

      • Who writing embedded systems uses VSCode in the web?

        • A compiler is a tool. Programmers can use tools for whatever application they want. And who cares if it's on the web? I use Google Colab on the web for all my deep learning programming.

          • Programmers can use tools for whatever application they want.

            That's why I use ed. And sometimes I use od for examining data.

    • Yeah, but Smalltalk comes from an era where people spent more time thinking about what they would do than doing it. Smalltalk is a well designed system, while browsers are something that just happened, something that was driven by very unhealthy interests. For example Smalltalk had no interest in deliberately making everything more complex while browser vendors constantly have that motivation as it can keep away new competitors.

  • Welcome to the Future (Score:5, Funny)

    by parityshrimp ( 6342140 ) on Saturday October 23, 2021 @12:57PM (#61920289)

    We have been saying for years that the future of developer tools is the browser.

    Welcome to the future you never wanted.

    • I'm calling bullshit on their statement, along with "Bringing VS Code to the browser is the realization of the original vision for the product". Anyone got a link to an archived page from 2015 that says anything about the "original vision" apart from being a cross platform IDE (because it's an Electron app)?

      • Electron always seemed like a giant kludge to me, i.e. why would I download a complete Chromium for every app I wanted to use when I already had a web runtime named Firefox?

        But we're in 2021 when Chromium is the system runtime across Windows 11, Android and Chrome OS and any 'native' stuff can now be transpiled to webassembly.

        Cynicism noted but who's not to say the "original vision" wasn't to ditch with the download? Wasm's predecessor, Google Native Client, existed from before that time.

        • At least they could devise a system where, if you have, a compatible version of Electron installed on your PC it would let you use that one instead of bundling it with every app. Then Electron apps would still use way too much CPU and RAM but at least they'd use less disk :P.

        • why would I download a complete Chromium for every app I wanted to use when I already had a web runtime named Firefox?

          One reason is that the applications you want to use use web-to-desktop platform integration APIs that are present either in Chromium or in the native components included with the customized copy of Chromium and absent in Firefox. For example, Discord.exe has system-wide push-to-talk and (optional) inclusion of statistics from the game you're playing, whereas Discord in Firefox lacks those features because of web application sandboxing. I also seem to remember it taking years for Discord in Firefox to start [github.com]

  • Welcome back to ActiveX (Score:4, Funny)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Saturday October 23, 2021 @01:33PM (#61920357)
    Honey, I promise, I can change.
  • IDEs are definitely on that list.
  • ...but I would definitely love to have it available on the terminal and replace vi/emacs (I do use both)

  • Gitpod co-founder Johannes Landgraf calls it "yet another validation that we reached a tipping point of how and where we develop software"

    It seems like self-validation, "see, told you this is the way it should go, and by us going there it's proof that we were right". I know gitpod is a bit separate, but it's still a whole set of vendors with ulterior motives trying to make people feel weird if they aren't doing things exactly the way it plays into their business plans, using vendor-side moves to indicate proof that the community is all on board with this.

    There's been an unfortunate trend as if the industry as a whole is trying to 'fix the mi

  • So, instead of mainframes, we have the "cloud". And instead of VT100 terminals... we have fully fledged desktop machines.. running a web browser.

    I can get the appeal to have kids on board with their chromebooks or ipads, and learn simple coding. Ideas like scratch, minecraft, and other pictoral things work great.

    But for actual development? If you cannot afford a workstation running visual studio, or eclipse, or IntelliJ, or even VIM for that matter, you probably cannot afford to hire a programmer either.

    Mov

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Broadly speaking, the cloud application paradigm is in many ways worse than the big iron+dumb terminal days. Then, from a technical perspective, it was at least still all in the hands of the site that owned it, with the terminals a practical compromise to share computing power that was impractical to provide to each user.

      Then personal computers largely obsoleted the model, as by the mid 90s it was quite cost effective to have everyone have all the power they needed locally, with file storage being the main

  • n/t

  • Caveats aside, VS Code for the Web does, indeed, offer a lightweight, available-anywhere code editor ...

    Emphasis mine. Calling doubt on this. On my Mac, a default installation of VS Code used 1GB of disk space and hundreds of MB of RAM. Lightweight it is not, and its sheer bulk is why I went with Sublime Text instead.

    Also, VS Code already runs on a browser, as it uses the blight on mankind that is the Electron framework. This doesn't seem particularly impressive to me, but maybe I'm missing something.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Well *someone* had to take on the mantle of overweight text editing after hardware outgrew emacs ability to be wasteful.

    • Heh, the definition of "lightweight" surely changes a lot. Years ago I saw some Java-written IDEs being called "lightweight" when they'd use lots of CPU and most of the RAM in your machine for working. Now that our hardware is better and Java-based programs don't strain the hardware that much we go to Electron-based apps and then they're called "lightweight". It's ridiculous.
      I know the reasons people write applications on Electron (portability, using web technologies which many people are already familiar

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        I'd still choose IDEs developed with natively-compiled languages if I could

        If you're looking for something "developed with natively-compiled languages" that's available for all three of Windows, macOS, and desktop Linux, that might be a bit harder to find. One task for which developers use Electron is covering up the differences among Win32, Cocoa, and FreeDesktop environments.

  • Too bad this couldn't be installed as a PWA. /s

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