Summary: "Visual Studio Online provides cloud-powered development environments for any activity - whether it's a long-term project, or a short-term task like reviewing a pull request. You can work with these environments from Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio (sign up for the Private Preview), or a browser-based editor that's accessible anywhere! You can even connect your own self-hosted environments to Visual Studio Online at no cost."
I'll admit this, I was wrong about Satya. I didn't think Microsoft was salvageable but he's been doing a stellar job. He's a great CEO and embracing open source was a really good move.
I shifted to VSCode from atom (before they purchased github) due to atom's memory hogging issues a while back. Haven't regretted the choice. For my private repos, I used to only use the free version of bitbucket but Microsoft introduced free private repos to github so I've been trying that out lately. If I like it, I'll stick with it.
Also, all my code is hosted on Azure now from AWS since late last year.
I tried WSL but didn't like it to due problems with paths but at this rate with which they're moving, it too might improve and I might find myself using only Microsoft for my work. Would not have predicted that if you asked me a few years back when I couldn't run away from Ms/Windows environment fast enough.
> And somehow Windows still doesn't ship with a decent text editor out of the box...
What would that look like? I mean a decent text editor is contextual. Are we talking about Wordpad upgrades for office usage, a lightweight code editor, or something else?
Plus don't people constantly criticize Microsoft for bloat/adding stuff to the base OS? Now they want Microsoft to ship Windows 10 with e.g. VSCode out of the box?
Really the need for a decent text editor out of the box isn't necessary if support for chocolatey repos is the first thing installed.
Having a simple/sane package management either out of the box or within a single step is really the right pattern to enable ease of installing whatever your text editor/customisation of choice is.
Installing atom or Vscode is ridiculously easy, what’s with this obsession that things need to be available out of the box? Perhaps it’s just my conditioning, but I automatically trust software that ships with a windows machine less than any binary I install myself.
- windows moving to metro, to get its users used to much simpler GUI elements
- embracing open source and move nt kernel to linux kernel, reducing the costs of development
- slowly move its on premise infrastructure to the cloud (office, exchange)
- move windows to the cloud and leave only smaller part local, just to pick up network (and potentially some other devices like graphic card)
- stop developing/selling locally installed windows and move to subscription based in cloud infrastructure
We will see if Satya is stellar or just devil. I have moved after 20 years of system developmeny on Windows to Linux. We will see what will happen.
> windows moving to metro, to get its users used to much simpler GUI elements
Tried in 8, met with utter failure, reverted by 10.
> embracing open source and move nt kernel to linux kernel, reducing the costs of development
...and throwing out pretty much everything that makes Windows better for a Desktop? Including their driver model, their backwards compatibility, etc? Unlikely. Replicating all of that to an appreciable standard would be significantly costly.
> slowly move its on premise infrastructure to the cloud (office, exchange)
This does seem to be happening, much to the chagrin of many, many smaller business that don't like to pay rent on their tools.
> move windows to the cloud and leave only smaller part local, just to pick up network (and potentially some other devices like graphic card)
Possible. Microsoft already has some kind of Windows Desktop as a Service, and RDP is damned good.
> stop developing/selling locally installed windows and move to subscription based in cloud infrastructure
They can try, but at best that just means that a whole lot of people will just stick with the last version of non-subscription-only Windows (as many did with 7 instead of moving to 8-10). I imagine it will be a large enough group that third parties pick up the slack and provide solutions to things MS is no longer fixing. At worst, there will be lynchings.
I can see them stopping the sale of windows, but not really using an online OS. I think they've just given up on the OS war and will try to get users to subscribe to their walled environment (office, azure, onenote, etc).
They're already doing that on mobile, they stopped fighting android and are now trying to be there in the form of apps and services for both android and ios.
Personally I think it makes sense: An OS is becoming more and more a layer to access the web. Most people use just a web browser and a couple other apps. It makes sense for their focus to be not in that layer, but in being the app/web that the user searches for.
> I tried WSL but didn't like it to due problems with paths but at this rate with which they're moving
Docker Desktop for Windows seems to still be a bit iffy and WSL is sometimes painfully slow (especially when compiling native code) but overall I'm quite happy with it now thanks to the Remote VSCode extensions.
Maybe don't lie if you want to be taken seriously?
I've got 6 different Windows 10 machines active on my home network at any given time and I'm blocking Microsoft Telemetry via Pi-Hole. Microsoft Telemetry doesn't even account for 20% of the blocked traffic.
A couple of cherry picked examples also don't make them "bad" though. Not sure how cherry picked they are, but I seem to be able to counter all those points just from experiences on the machine I'm typing this on; 20% is easy if there's hardly any traffic, isn't it? No seriously, where does this come from? I've never seen this Sugar Bob thing you talk about, and it's also not on my machine currently. All in all, I don't see many of these and similar things people complain about. Any idea why? The reboots aren't exactly unexpected, are they? And I haven't had updates break things for me either so unsure about the quality. I have seen them fix things though.
Then again, which OS is much better on all fronts? Still have to see it, and I tried/use a lot of them.
The updates are a bit ridiculous. I did a clean install, and like I used to do before, I installed all updates right away so I can take my mind off it for a while. But no, Windows 10 kept finding restart-worthy updates for a week. Seems to have stopped now. Is that normal?
While the business software and development side seems to go to the right direction, the consumer product side is basically series of incompetent and/or anti-customer decision/catastrophes. IMO You were right about Satya, all the positive things happening, because there is someone who can hold against him. (because if he would be the origin of the positive changes, than everything would be improving)
No I haven't due to time constraints. I was just disappointed and uninstalled to free up space. I will be getting some time off soon so I will reinstall and log the issues.
I want to like this, but having no support for Firefox, no SLA during the preview[1] & being unable to figure out the pricing model[2] makes that very difficult.
[1] How safe are my projects and what guarantees do I get that my work won't be lost?
[2] For cloud-hosted environments, each environment instance is billed based on the number of consumed “environment units”, which are calculated according to an environment’s instance size, the total time the environment is active (i.e. a user is connected to it via the browser-based editor or via a client such as Visual Studio Code) and the total lifetime of the environment (base units).
Can any light be shed on why Firefox support is lagging behind?
Releases like this, even in the preview phase, hurt Firefox adoption because people will go to try it out, see it doesn’t work, and think “welp, that’s another website that won’t load. Might as well just switch to Google Chrome”.
This looks to be a very good solution to enterprise companies that want to hire remote contractors as it gives them a platform that is much cheaper and arguable more (easy to) secure than other solutions such as VDI and VPN.
Once this is fully integrated with Azure and Office 365 it’s basically a one stop shop for outsourcing development work and if the pricing remains the same it’s also a very cheap one.
I, oddly, see a different pricing structure on that page. Full-time development Standard €55.10. This is assuming 100 active hours. "Active" being defined as "a user is connected […] via the browser-based editor". If I log in at 9AM and log out at 5PM every day for an average of 20 working days each month, I'd probably run ~€90 a month on the standard instance (and considerably more on the Premium instance). My current laptop cost around €1, 200 and I can easily provision a new one at any time using an Ansible playbook[1].
I am most definitely not the target audience of VS Online, which is perfectly fine. Someone out there needs this for it to have been built by MS.
You source code is hosted in Github. I'd imagine the dev environment is ephemeral and is spun up, code edited, and then disappears until it's provisioned next.
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.
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.
I think people are missing the point that these cloud IDEs mean you don't need to be nearby or carry around a powerful + expensive laptop to work.
You could travel with a cheap throwaway Chromebook and know you can still get work done. If it gets stolen or lost, you can get a replacement the same day and get back to work.
I've been in situations where I've travelled to some place where I don't want to bring my expensive work laptop (e.g. want to travel light, the weather is awful, it's a sketchy area), and had my work laptop break randomly a couple of days before a big deadline where I couldn't wait for it to get repaired.
A problem I've run across is that machines with small SSDs are often not suitable for Visual Studio (the 'real' VS, not VS Code) if you want to do certain kinds of native development.
Installing some combinations of dev tools eats significant chunks of hard drive space, and worse, a lot of that space seems to be on C:, which often is a small SSD. You can ask for Visual Studio to install on other drives, but it will still eat a chunk of space on C:. The installer actually shows how much space will be used up on the system drive. Also VS is very slow if SSDs aren't available -- the VS docs recommend an SSD, in fact.
None of this matters to professional Windows (C++/C#) developers with 512GB-1TB SSDs or more, but remember than you can get started with Node, or Java, or Python, on much more lower-end machines. It's also much quicker to install and get started with these platforms.
So yes, anything that reduces developer friction and gets them to consider building rich Windows apps is a good thing for Microsoft -- it's almost too late already, but making it brain-dead easy to develop rich, native Windows apps would be a great start. They could and should offer free/low-cost online environments for hobbyists and students, for instance.
At least in the late 2000's, input latency made this incredibly painful for me over all but the very best connections. I haven't tried it since then, but maybe some of the Stadia tech can improve things.
Thin clients are not exactly a new thing and mean that you are completely out of luck if you have a bad/no internet connection.
Also, you probably still want a decent screen and keyboard and need to pay for the remote machine as well, at which point it becomes not really cheaper.
> You could travel with a cheap throwaway Chromebook and know you can still get work done. If it gets stolen or lost, you can get a replacement the same day and get back to work.
If I'm traveling light, a 1.5KG Macbook Pro or X1 Carbon Thinkpad is not going to cause me problems, and I'd much rather go without extra t-shirts or sandals (which I can buy and toss) than my laptop.
OTOH, one of my biggest issues with traveling, especially to foreign countries outside the West, is lack of decent internet. Numerous times I basically just had to work offline the best I could using my real IDE and local git repos, and then sync up at an expensive hotel or restaurant with decent wifi, in which I wasn't staying or eating (i.e. use it quickly to sync, not sit there all day).
There's no stack I work in for which a single program is enough to get things done, even if it's a giant, bloated IDE like Visual Studio, IntelliJ, or RubyMine. When I need to operate on the outputs of the IDE, how am I supposed to use my other tools with those files, when they're locked up in a cloud service without a filesystem? Maybe this works for a pull-request review and merge, but I can't see it being useful for any more than that.
Could you expand upon your tools and workflow a bit?
It's not that I disagree with you, at least not for your use cases! But it's not hard for me to think of cases where this would work.
First, a quick anecdote - I run a dirt cheap, crummy Windows server at home for pet projects. I've been doing this for well over a decade. Maybe two? Along the way, I wrote a basic web interface for editing files on the server. Basic upload, rename/move, edit text files kind of thing. For pet projects, I work on them infrequently, but sometimes an idea will strike me, or I become aware of a bug or typo, and I just want to get in and fix the issue. Now, these were simpler times - the most complex code was classic ASP or JavaScript! The toolchain was non-existent.
A use case for pet projects would be cloud-hosted, cloud-repository, cloud-pipeline, and now cloud-development. When an idea strikes you, rather than pull things locally, configure them for that particular project, with that peculiar set of frameworks and toolchains, you can load up your cloud IDE which is already configured to point to the repository, build and test in a container, deploy through a pipeline to the cloud host, and just focus on making the edits you want without all the work of getting things local.
As someone who spent a few hours the other morning working on a computer I don't usually work on just getting the git credentials and containers and runtimes working before I could start getting any work done, I could definitely see a use case for this cloud-based development paradigm.
I build a Windows Service which reports to a SaaS. As-is, I have to uninstall the app and use a lot of specific tooling if I want to test a larger change and not go through a bunch of joops. I don't think I'm a good use case for VS web beside maybe fixing a typo in my repo while I'm on the go.
Years ago, I'd have called myself a dying breed, but I don't think thats true,
You get a Linux (with windows "soon") box in your environment, and all of your code comes in to it and is executed there. You have root. What tools can you not run from within the container? (especially considering that if you really needed to, you could set your local workstation as another environment and move files in between, although at that point why do you need a online IDE (except for conf. management).
On one hand, this is a pretty easy move to make because of what VSCode already is.
On the other hand, I don't actually switch contexts that often to warrant switching to a web IDE full-time.
It will be handy and used for quick edits, but I don't buy their sales pitch. Hopefully they don't try to go too far with this to the detriment of the VSCode or start offering web-only features.
was going to make a similar comment but mention that i can see this as an advantage over google and amazon clouds. they can just offer a solid editor with their offering now, making it easier to develop on their cloud.
I'm really not a fan of the trend towards everything being remote-hosted. With things like this and also Stadia and Google Colab, it seems like the big three cloud providers are rushing us toward a world where almost everything is executed in a datacenter somewhere, and your workstation is just an interface.
I think this development is especially dangerous with how Microsoft is positioned with Github. They already own where a huge percentage of open-source code is hosted. If they also come to own the defacto place that code is compiled and executed, that would give them a huge amount of power in the industry.
If you're not in control of the hardware your code is compiled and executed on, someone else can place limits on what works and what doesn't. Who's to say Microsoft wouldn't use that to benefit Azure and Windows to the detriment of competitors, consumers, and developers.
It's a cloud dev environment running in a VM (which you provision). It can work directly in the browser using the VS Code shell or you can connect to it with your locally running VS Code or Visual Studio.
Similar to devs feeling the need to develop against a local kubernetes cluster I guess I'm too old (and I'm not that old!) to see the practical problem being solved with Visual Studio Online versus the marketing problem we're being told it solves. The most likely consumers of this are probably going to be far along the micro-services bandwagon anyway, and between containers, env vars, feature switches, etc... it's just never seemed necessary to spin up ENTIRE environments for what should be isolated changes, it's pretty easy to test against an already running integration environment.
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Summary: "Visual Studio Online provides cloud-powered development environments for any activity - whether it's a long-term project, or a short-term task like reviewing a pull request. You can work with these environments from Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio (sign up for the Private Preview), or a browser-based editor that's accessible anywhere! You can even connect your own self-hosted environments to Visual Studio Online at no cost."
I shifted to VSCode from atom (before they purchased github) due to atom's memory hogging issues a while back. Haven't regretted the choice. For my private repos, I used to only use the free version of bitbucket but Microsoft introduced free private repos to github so I've been trying that out lately. If I like it, I'll stick with it.
Also, all my code is hosted on Azure now from AWS since late last year.
I tried WSL but didn't like it to due problems with paths but at this rate with which they're moving, it too might improve and I might find myself using only Microsoft for my work. Would not have predicted that if you asked me a few years back when I couldn't run away from Ms/Windows environment fast enough.
It just hit me that since GitHub was bought, both VSCode and Atom are owned by Microsoft.
And somehow Windows still doesn't ship with a decent text editor out of the box...
What would that look like? I mean a decent text editor is contextual. Are we talking about Wordpad upgrades for office usage, a lightweight code editor, or something else?
Plus don't people constantly criticize Microsoft for bloat/adding stuff to the base OS? Now they want Microsoft to ship Windows 10 with e.g. VSCode out of the box?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-insider/at-home/wha...
Having a simple/sane package management either out of the box or within a single step is really the right pattern to enable ease of installing whatever your text editor/customisation of choice is.
Dead Comment
- windows moving to metro, to get its users used to much simpler GUI elements
- embracing open source and move nt kernel to linux kernel, reducing the costs of development - slowly move its on premise infrastructure to the cloud (office, exchange)
- move windows to the cloud and leave only smaller part local, just to pick up network (and potentially some other devices like graphic card)
- stop developing/selling locally installed windows and move to subscription based in cloud infrastructure
We will see if Satya is stellar or just devil. I have moved after 20 years of system developmeny on Windows to Linux. We will see what will happen.
Tried in 8, met with utter failure, reverted by 10.
> embracing open source and move nt kernel to linux kernel, reducing the costs of development
...and throwing out pretty much everything that makes Windows better for a Desktop? Including their driver model, their backwards compatibility, etc? Unlikely. Replicating all of that to an appreciable standard would be significantly costly.
> slowly move its on premise infrastructure to the cloud (office, exchange)
This does seem to be happening, much to the chagrin of many, many smaller business that don't like to pay rent on their tools.
> move windows to the cloud and leave only smaller part local, just to pick up network (and potentially some other devices like graphic card)
Possible. Microsoft already has some kind of Windows Desktop as a Service, and RDP is damned good.
> stop developing/selling locally installed windows and move to subscription based in cloud infrastructure
They can try, but at best that just means that a whole lot of people will just stick with the last version of non-subscription-only Windows (as many did with 7 instead of moving to 8-10). I imagine it will be a large enough group that third parties pick up the slack and provide solutions to things MS is no longer fixing. At worst, there will be lynchings.
They're already doing that on mobile, they stopped fighting android and are now trying to be there in the form of apps and services for both android and ios.
Personally I think it makes sense: An OS is becoming more and more a layer to access the web. Most people use just a web browser and a couple other apps. It makes sense for their focus to be not in that layer, but in being the app/web that the user searches for.
Docker Desktop for Windows seems to still be a bit iffy and WSL is sometimes painfully slow (especially when compiling native code) but overall I'm quite happy with it now thanks to the Remote VSCode extensions.
I'm really looking forward to WSL2 though.
My condolences about living with
* spending ~20% of traffic for telemetry
* bloatware/low quality updates
* unexpected reboots after system upgrade
* non-removable Sugar Bob game in Windows Pro(!) edition
Sorry, but all this crap doesn't makes MS "good" in any sense.
What platform is perfect?
Maybe don't lie if you want to be taken seriously?
I've got 6 different Windows 10 machines active on my home network at any given time and I'm blocking Microsoft Telemetry via Pi-Hole. Microsoft Telemetry doesn't even account for 20% of the blocked traffic.
Pi-Hole is blocking about 10% of traffic overall.
Then again, which OS is much better on all fronts? Still have to see it, and I tried/use a lot of them.
Telemetry can be blocked through a firewall.
In fairness the reboots after updates is kind of expected these days. I'm always surprised when I don't have to reboot.
I don't have a Sugar Bob game on my pro edition.
[1] How safe are my projects and what guarantees do I get that my work won't be lost?
[2] For cloud-hosted environments, each environment instance is billed based on the number of consumed “environment units”, which are calculated according to an environment’s instance size, the total time the environment is active (i.e. a user is connected to it via the browser-based editor or via a client such as Visual Studio Code) and the total lifetime of the environment (base units).
Check the prev discussion that has more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21442088
Releases like this, even in the preview phase, hurt Firefox adoption because people will go to try it out, see it doesn’t work, and think “welp, that’s another website that won’t load. Might as well just switch to Google Chrome”.
So, 2 years of developpement cost the price of a nice laptop, which you need anyway to access the cloud.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/visual-stu...
Once this is fully integrated with Azure and Office 365 it’s basically a one stop shop for outsourcing development work and if the pricing remains the same it’s also a very cheap one.
I am most definitely not the target audience of VS Online, which is perfectly fine. Someone out there needs this for it to have been built by MS.
[1]: https://github.com/StanAngeloff/longitude
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
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.
You could travel with a cheap throwaway Chromebook and know you can still get work done. If it gets stolen or lost, you can get a replacement the same day and get back to work.
I've been in situations where I've travelled to some place where I don't want to bring my expensive work laptop (e.g. want to travel light, the weather is awful, it's a sketchy area), and had my work laptop break randomly a couple of days before a big deadline where I couldn't wait for it to get repaired.
A problem I've run across is that machines with small SSDs are often not suitable for Visual Studio (the 'real' VS, not VS Code) if you want to do certain kinds of native development.
Installing some combinations of dev tools eats significant chunks of hard drive space, and worse, a lot of that space seems to be on C:, which often is a small SSD. You can ask for Visual Studio to install on other drives, but it will still eat a chunk of space on C:. The installer actually shows how much space will be used up on the system drive. Also VS is very slow if SSDs aren't available -- the VS docs recommend an SSD, in fact.
None of this matters to professional Windows (C++/C#) developers with 512GB-1TB SSDs or more, but remember than you can get started with Node, or Java, or Python, on much more lower-end machines. It's also much quicker to install and get started with these platforms.
So yes, anything that reduces developer friction and gets them to consider building rich Windows apps is a good thing for Microsoft -- it's almost too late already, but making it brain-dead easy to develop rich, native Windows apps would be a great start. They could and should offer free/low-cost online environments for hobbyists and students, for instance.
You already don't need to do this! Just RDP into your workstation. Christ, we've been doing it since the 90s people!
Also, you probably still want a decent screen and keyboard and need to pay for the remote machine as well, at which point it becomes not really cheaper.
Example from 2012: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/swap-your-laptop-ipad-l...
If I'm traveling light, a 1.5KG Macbook Pro or X1 Carbon Thinkpad is not going to cause me problems, and I'd much rather go without extra t-shirts or sandals (which I can buy and toss) than my laptop.
OTOH, one of my biggest issues with traveling, especially to foreign countries outside the West, is lack of decent internet. Numerous times I basically just had to work offline the best I could using my real IDE and local git repos, and then sync up at an expensive hotel or restaurant with decent wifi, in which I wasn't staying or eating (i.e. use it quickly to sync, not sit there all day).
There's no stack I work in for which a single program is enough to get things done, even if it's a giant, bloated IDE like Visual Studio, IntelliJ, or RubyMine. When I need to operate on the outputs of the IDE, how am I supposed to use my other tools with those files, when they're locked up in a cloud service without a filesystem? Maybe this works for a pull-request review and merge, but I can't see it being useful for any more than that.
It's not that I disagree with you, at least not for your use cases! But it's not hard for me to think of cases where this would work.
First, a quick anecdote - I run a dirt cheap, crummy Windows server at home for pet projects. I've been doing this for well over a decade. Maybe two? Along the way, I wrote a basic web interface for editing files on the server. Basic upload, rename/move, edit text files kind of thing. For pet projects, I work on them infrequently, but sometimes an idea will strike me, or I become aware of a bug or typo, and I just want to get in and fix the issue. Now, these were simpler times - the most complex code was classic ASP or JavaScript! The toolchain was non-existent.
A use case for pet projects would be cloud-hosted, cloud-repository, cloud-pipeline, and now cloud-development. When an idea strikes you, rather than pull things locally, configure them for that particular project, with that peculiar set of frameworks and toolchains, you can load up your cloud IDE which is already configured to point to the repository, build and test in a container, deploy through a pipeline to the cloud host, and just focus on making the edits you want without all the work of getting things local.
As someone who spent a few hours the other morning working on a computer I don't usually work on just getting the git credentials and containers and runtimes working before I could start getting any work done, I could definitely see a use case for this cloud-based development paradigm.
Years ago, I'd have called myself a dying breed, but I don't think thats true,
This might be a bit of an assumption :)
On the other hand, I don't actually switch contexts that often to warrant switching to a web IDE full-time.
It will be handy and used for quick edits, but I don't buy their sales pitch. Hopefully they don't try to go too far with this to the detriment of the VSCode or start offering web-only features.
I think this development is especially dangerous with how Microsoft is positioned with Github. They already own where a huge percentage of open-source code is hosted. If they also come to own the defacto place that code is compiled and executed, that would give them a huge amount of power in the industry.
If you're not in control of the hardware your code is compiled and executed on, someone else can place limits on what works and what doesn't. Who's to say Microsoft wouldn't use that to benefit Azure and Windows to the detriment of competitors, consumers, and developers.