Use Visual Studio Code in your browser, thanks to Azure

Yes, the Electron-based Visual Studio Code – an app built in HTML and JavaScript – is not usable in a web browser. What a weird world we live in.

You may sitting there in your coffee shop, staring with contempt at your weakling tablet and thinking “boy, I wish I could run Visual Studio Code on this powerful lemon”. Well Microsoft apparently listened to you and your gaping wallet. You can now use Visual Studio Code, online!

The aptly named Visual Studio Online – designed to confuse the real Visual Studio developers up and down the land – runs the full Visual Studio Code experience within your web browser. But how, you probably didn’t ask?

Visual Studio Online hooks up to a Azure cloud instance that will run a full copy of Visual Studio Code. Basically, the web version (basically a pseudo-copy) will stream all the changes back to this real copy. Woohoo, programming – Netflix style!

But I’m too poor to afford Azure…

Don’t worry, my financially-challenged friend. No regular human can afford Azure.

You can install Visual Studio Online plugin on a computer of choice, and use that as your streamable programming buddy. This means you can use your home PC, a virtual machine, Raspberry Pi, just about anything that can run the latest version of Visual Studio Code.

To do this, you still need a Microsoft Azure account on a minimum subscription of pay-as-you-go. You don’t have to rent out any of their expensive packages, you just need the account to link your remote VSCode setup to.

First Impressions

Microsoft are keen to point out this is insider quality, and is not yet ready for production usage. This is also made obvious by the fact it is not compatible with Firefox. Likely this stems from the regular editor being built upon Electron.

I tried this out by setting up an Ubuntu Hyper-V container, installing Visual Studio Code with Online, and hooking it up to my Azure account.

As far as what I tried, it works just as I would expect the desktop version to work. Extensions all appear to be the same, project and installation settings work (I assume client settings are per-browser, as it lost mine frequently), and the terminal works really well on the existing machine.

This works really well combined with Docker and ngrok, or with a forwarded port open via the home broadband router. All my extensions were compatible, and even Intellisense kept up well despite both a struggling VM and broadband.

This currently isn’t mobile friendly, so don’t expect to do any on-the-fly miracles with your phone. However, this works a treat on tablets for those remote working moments without a primary machine.

I’m really impressed with Visual Studio Online so far, and I can categorically say this will replace my AWS Cloud9 via SSH editor that I used to use.

Any thoughts, or want me to try anything out? Please, let me know via the comments below!