Scott Hanselman

Trying out Visual Studio Online - Using the cloud to manage and compile your code is amazing

November 01, 2019 Comment on this post [8] Posted in VSOnline
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Visual Studio Online was announced in preview, so I wanted to try it out. I already dig the Visual Studio "Remote" technology (it's almost impossibly amazing) so moving the local container or WSL to the Cloud makes a lot of sense. Check out their blog post here.

There's three quick starts.

Sweet. I'll start with with Browser version, which is the easiest one I'm guessing. I head to the login page. I'm using the new Edge browser.

I see this page that says I have no "environments" set up.

VS Online for the Browser

I'll make a plan. I changed mine to fall asleep (suspend) in 5 minutes, but the default is 30. Pricing is here.

Creating a 4 Core, 8 Gig of RAM environment

Now it's making my environment.

Sweet. VS Online

I clicked on it. Then opened a new Terminal, ran "dotnet new web" and I'm basically in a thin VS Code, except in the browser. I've got intellicode, I can install the C# extension.

I'm in VS Code but it's not, it's VS Online in a browser

Since I'm running a .NET app I had to run these commands in a new terminal to generate and trust certs for SSL.

dotnet dev-certs https
dotnet dev-certs https -- trust

Then I hit the Debug menu to build and compile my app IN THE CLOUD and I get "connecting to the forwarded port" as its "localhost" is in the cloud.

Connecting to the forwarded port

Now I've hit a breakpoint! That's bonkers.

Hello World IN THE CLOUD

Now to try it in VS Code rather than online in the browser. I installed the Visual Studio Online extention and clicked on the little Remote Environment thing on the left side after running VS Code.

This is amazing. Look on the left side there. You can see my Raspberry PI as an SSH target. You can see my new VS Online Plan, you can see my Docker Containers because I'm running Docker for Windows, you can see my WSL Targets as I've got multiple local Linuxes.

Since I'm running currently in VS Online (see the HanselmanTestPlan1 in the lower corner in green) I can just hit F5 and it compiles and runs.

It's a client-server app. VS Code is doing some of the work, but the heavy lifting is in the cloud. Same as if I split the work between Windows and WSL locally, in this case VS Code is talking to that 8 gig Linux Environment I made earlier.

VS Code attached to VS Online

When I hit localhost:500x it's forwarded up to the cloud:

Port forwarding

Amazing. Now I can do dev on a little cheapo laptop but have a major server to the work in the cloud. I can then head over to https://online.visualstudio.com/environments and delete it, or I can let it suspend.

Suspending a VS Online Environment

I'm going to continue to explore this and see if I can open my blog and podcast sites in this world. Then I can open and develop on them from anywhere. Or soon from my iPad Pro!

Go give Visual Studio Online a try. It's Preview but it's lovely.


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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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November 09, 2019 0:51
I thought the environments were Debian Linux. I also thought that --trust didn't work on Linux ("On Linux there isn't a standard way across distros to trust the certificate, so you'll need to perform the distro specific guidance for trusting the development certificate.").

I spent a few hours trying to figure out how to get a web app working because it seemed like it just wouldn't port forward or would trust the cert.

So I'm confused that it seemed incredibly easy for you. I was just about to start asking around if I should expect dotnet new razor to work.

Next up I want to see if I can install .NET Core 3.0 SDK on it.
November 09, 2019 7:09
How can I get VS online in the browser to work with my github.com private repo? Would love to use this on my android table running the edge browser.
November 09, 2019 7:17
nevermind, realized I just needed to specify the repo at enviroment creation and it prompted me to authenticate against github for my private repo, awesome!
November 09, 2019 8:04
I get this error message, any ideas why? Microsoft.AspNetCore.Server.Kestrel[0]
Unable to bind to http://localhost:5000 on the IPv6 loopback interface: 'Error -99 EADDRNOTAVAIL address not available'
November 11, 2019 6:52
guessing I'm just posting here as I work through this... changed from the default port to 4000 in the launch.json of my .net core 2.2 MVC app it now launches into another browser window, but the next issue is the Azure AD post login redirect is failing when the URL I am logging in from is now https://345fbe0c6e60cc710c4fb084d5d825166224-4000.app.online.visualstudio.com wondering how anyone else got around this?
November 11, 2019 20:31
Is there a good database story for this yet? Any way to spin up SQL local db or SQL Express inside the environment? Or do I have to spin up SQL Azure instance just for dev?
November 12, 2019 12:16
this is amazing :)
but... no netcore3 support?

'The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET Core 3.0.'

is that planned?
November 15, 2019 14:20
I haven't given it a try yet but sounds interesting as the online browser version can really make things must similar and provide more remote access to users.

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.