[xendipity]

Ah, this really makes sense with all of the recent work they've done on VSCode's remote development capabilities.

- An early announcement on their focus: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2019/05/02/remote-develo...

- Most (all?) of their recent VSCode updates include improvements to remote development. i.e.: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_44#_remote-developm...

- Facebook partnering and becoming an early, heavy adopter: https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2019/11/19/faceboo...

[ivalm]

Their remote development capability is amazing and was quite a game changer for me. Having a nice ide where all of the plugins work on a remote server as if everything is local is so nice!

[plexicle]

The SSH plugin is insanely good. I can dev from a Windows machine and SSH into my Mac and do React Native (native) iOS modules. Even my zsh shell acts as if it's local. Running `pod install` from Windows. It's seemless.

[steve_adams_86]

I agree. I was floored by how well it worked, and actually had doubts that it was working in the way I expected it to/it's supposed to. It was just so seamless and natural. I kept thinking there was no way it was using the correct configuration, running the right scripts, etc.

It was a lifesaver too. I was using a severely under-powered ThinkPad and I'm admittedly awful with Windows. Being able to quickly swap to that remote setup reduced a tremendous amount of friction for me.

When good software works, it's so cool.

[lawik]

So nice when it works and has been breaking incredibly badly for me recently. The Python extensions that vscode was trying to bring up whenever I connected to my remote had some weird interaction with a virtualenv and just pinned the server to 100% CPU and rendered it completely unresponsive. Repeatedly. Reboot to recover.

Generally extremely good, but for obvious reasons this makes me think twice about connecting to some things.

[dleslie]

Emacs has had Tramp for ages, which does this. Yes, it's amazing. :)

[dastbe]

remote dev (and I guess now codespaces) is one of those "clear differentiators" that is actually getting me to move away from intellij and friends.

[scoutt]

It's amazing!

I've been doing some AOSP customization (Android 9) and I have several remote (Ubuntu) servers hosting/building OS images for different implementations (it takes too much disk space for a local PC and even so, I have a Windows based PC because of reasons, so if I had to use VMs, it would be too slow).

Now I can use intellisense through the entire Linux folder without delays. And... a global search for a string takes no more than 2 seconds. And I am talking about a string search through the entire codebase (not just the kernel; thousands of files).

My days are brighter, my life happier, my mood changed; thank you whoever invented this!

[zimmund]

How does it work with poor or slow internet connection?

[birracerveza]

True, I love it and it has been a game changer. The only problem with that is that it only works with the official VSCode, not with the OSS counterpart, which is a damn shame.

[realharo]

The WSL integration is a pretty good result of that effort too.

[ehsankia]

Is there a way yet for me to run a server on Windows, and be able to code anywhere from my web browser? I basically want code-server that works on Windows.

https://github.com/cdr/code-server

[WorldMaker]

You can register your own machines with Visual Studio Codespaces: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/bring-your-own-m...

It's not entirely self-hosted, but it's an interesting hybrid middle-ground.

[nhooyr]

Coming soon :)

[thwarted]

I wish the vscode remote dev functionality didn't require a binary server/remote side component. I have a bunch of users who want to use it, but it's not compatible with the system libraries on our servers and dev environments.

[_jal]

Reminds me of a job in a past life I was quite happy to leave. It seemed like all I did was clean up low-end websites compromised through Frontpage extensions.

That was a year I'll never get back, but I do highly recommend the fun of leaving _vti_bin/ directories laying around with funny-behaving things in them. Every few months I still see evidence in my personal site logs of a script kiddie slowly becoming enraged as they figure out I left them a busy box to play with.

[soVeryTired]

Are you sure it needs a remote component? The remote SSH dev experience is actually pretty good in python.

[shaklee3]

Use the remote containers plugin and that problem goes away.

[aryamaan]

Didn't we already solve this problem with containers?

[sneak]

There are perpetual reminders all around that Microsoft's only pretending to like f/oss because that's where the developer attention (and thus corporate money) is. There's spyware in all of their open source apps (TypeScript excluded, because they couldn't get away with it there) that you can of course patch out, but you can't get it removed from the project because, free software or not, Microsoft gets to decide what goes in or out.

Bet you a dollar the GitHub mobile app that's going to come out pretty soon will also be totally proprietary with no source provided. It's a growing trend in developer tooling: even Docker's desktop versions (not Microsoft's fault, but still) are not even open source (much less free software).

It's going to be really sad in a few years when Microsoft starts turning the screws to extract more revenue from this free software ecosystem (GitHub/npm) that they are coming to exert major control over.

Soon, the most common "industry standard" tooling for the largest and most popular software development ecosystem (javascript) will rely heavily on proprietary software that spies on you continuously while you use it, just like Windows.