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by joecot 2418 days ago
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.

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.
1 comments
donmcronald 2418 days ago
Why not use RDP to your normal desktop if you're going to self host?
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joecot 2418 days ago
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.

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donmcronald 2418 days ago
> 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.

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