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Introducing Visual Studio Codespaces: Cloud Development, Wherever You Are

As we all implement practices such as social distance and distance work, the development teams have become more distributed. Our own team faced some challenges that are part of this transition, and this has prompted us to step up our efforts to help developers stay productive from anywhere . First, we simplified remote collaboration by allowing users to join Live Share sessions from their browser . Today we are pleased to share with you news, this time about Visual Studio Online, that will help you work productively, wherever you are.



Introducing Visual Studio Codespaces


In November, we announced the release of Public Preview Visual Studio Online. Over the past few months, we have received a huge number of reviews and have worked well on the tool. One of the most frequently cited comments we have seen is that the ability to create cloud-based development environments has a positive effect on more factors than we previously thought. In particular, our users believe that:

  • The time required to connect to new projects (or new tasks in an existing project) is much shorter
  • The performance of their cloud-based development environment is in many ways better than in the on-premises environment.
  • The ability to easily switch between Visual Studio Code, a browser editor or Visual Studio IDE (in private Preview) gives them the opportunity to work from almost any device.
  • Working with colleagues is easy, as Live Share can be used for collaborative development, editing, and debugging.

We learned that developers consider Visual Studio Online to be more than just a “browser editor." They say that "the capabilities of this cloud-based development environment make it the place where you want to write all your code."

To better match this mood and the true value of the service, we rename Visual Studio Online to Visual Studio Codespaces. Do you want to get cool experience on your big project? Do it in Codespace. Do you need to quickly create a prototype of a new function or perform some short-term tasks (for example, working with Pull Requests)? Create Codespace. Your Codespace is simply the most productive code space.

Prices are now lower


We believe Visual Studio Online Codespaces offers the best remote development experience on the market. We want as many people as possible to have access to Codespaces and use them, especially given the challenges that we all face today. To make this a reality, we have reduced prices.

As always, we will continue to charge you only for the time and resources that you use. While you are active in Codespace, it uses Azure computing resources. New prices for each active Codespace are available on our Azure pricing page or price calculator .

Only the power you need


Finally, we are also announcing one new feature today. Although developers love the performance that they see in our cloud Codespaces, we also found out that there are many scenarios that either do not require so much power or where developers want to run several small code spaces (Codespaces) so that they can work in multitasking mode .

To better implement these scenarios, and to help people try remote development for the first time, we present the base instance type, which comes with two virtual cores, four GB of RAM and 64 GB of SSD storage. We did a lot of testing with this configuration, and the experience is just as wonderful as on our types of Standard and Premium, but at a lower cost. Basic instance types are available right now.

Remote development. Better than ever


Over the past few months, we have added some other cool features to the service! My personal favorite is support for creating your own Docker files or images . Using this feature, Codespace can be adapted to your specifications, either by pointing to an image from a registry such as a Docker Hub, or by placing your own Dockerfile in your repository, which you will be connected to when you start Visual Studio code spaces.

We also recently released a small but important feature that allows users to resize instances in their environments. This means that you can spend most of your time in an environment with lower power consumption and lower cost, and then “increase power” only when you need to - without losing state or having to create a new environment. This even supports the instance type of Basic.

The last recent addition that pleased me was the huge improvement that we made to the capabilities of self-hosted environments. With stand-alone environments, you can register any computer in Visual Studio Codespaces and connect to it from VS Code or a browser. Moreover, it is 100% free. My colleague Allison described all the details. - Do not forget to read her post for more information.

Try


Try Visual Studio Codespaces and tell us what you think.

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