I wanted to try this as the possibilities could be quite cool but got discouraged after seeing it is a monthly service. Tired of everything turning into a service that you pay for. Rather just carry my laptop.
If you don't have them host the environment for you, it doesn't cost a dime. If you have a desktop, or a server (that can run a gui for now, because they don't have a CLI option yet), you can run VSCode locally on there, install the VS Online extension, and register it with your VS Online account. You can then use VS Online "self hosted", with it connecting to your machine, for free.
My only issue is that it doesn't seem to work with SSH Remote environments yet (I use my desktop VSCode to connect to my servers), just environments local to your VSCode install. But I would expect support will be coming.
RDP essentially takes video of your machine and transfers it over the internet. Same with keyboard and mouse interactions. Which has 3 main flaws:
1) If your internet connection isn't great, the responsiveness is terrible.
2) If you're using a slow machine as a guest, it can choke on the video feed
3) If you're using a metered bandwidth connection (sometimes I have to tether off my phone, which gets 5gb of data a month) you can quickly chew through your data. One time I capped out my data for the month just trying to do this for a couple hours.
On the other hand, VSCode is electron based, which means the entire UI can just be loaded into the browser. Then the only interactions passed across the net is low bandwidth text. Much more responsive because the keyboard/mouse responses are local, much less bandwidth intensive.
I already enjoy this using VSCode with SSH Remote to remote environments, and I had given up on my chromebook since other cloud IDEs have left me wanting. VS Online might bring my chromebook back into rotation again.
> One time I capped out my data for the month just trying to do this for a couple hours.
I have an LTE data plan that's limited to 3Mbit/s and I don't have a problem working over RDP. It uses about 100MB per hour.
I guess I just don't get the appeal. If you use VSO exclusively, it's super expensive. If you use it casually, you still need to have a local development environment and RDP seems reasonable for casual use.
Exactly. The SAAS model for creative software only benefits the service provider. Modern laptop CPUs are really fast - there's no non-business reason to outsource my IDE workloads to a datacenter.
I don’t think individual developers is the target audience for this.
This might be an excellent solutions for companies that hire remote contractors, no need to provide VDI or VPN access which requires you to open your network more than this.
This + Office 365 means that you can grant easy and extremely restricted access to external entities to deliver code and work collaboratively with your internal teams.
> non-business reason to outsource my IDE workloads to a datacenter.
I'm not sure what non-business reasons matter, perhaps you meant corporate mandates dictated from above?
I've made the switch to cloudbased IDE's and they are fantastic.
Granted I have my work laptop, a spare laptop (running OSX for historical reasons), and a powerful PC. The cloud IDE's--specifically AWS Cloud9, allows me to seamlessly switch between them.
It also means, I never have to carry a laptop with me. I just need my phone, and desktop class browser for emergency scenarios.
https://aka.ms/vso-docs/vscode/self-hosted
My only issue is that it doesn't seem to work with SSH Remote environments yet (I use my desktop VSCode to connect to my servers), just environments local to your VSCode install. But I would expect support will be coming.