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0 pointssailingparrot4y ago0 comments

> It's like how nerdy types could easily slap together their own Dropbox

Let's be honest, setting up and maintaining your dropbox clone, versus installing one executable once, are not the same kind of "easy".

> And then MS can start adding all kinds of collaboration tools built in, from pair coding to bug tracking, time tracking and so on.

But they can do that just as easily today with the vscode app. The fact that this runs in your browser does not help (or hinder) at all: As you said, offline VSCode is just a glorified browser.

> I can imagine an enterprise giving devs just this

presumably they would have to give you a laptop to access it, and any laptop that can run it in the browser can run it offline, this is 99% the same codebase.

Overall I also don't understand where this fits between offline VSCode and Codespaces. Codespaces makes sense because you don't even have to clone your code, and the compute/build happens elsewhere. Plus collaborative features can be added with no hassle because authentication is already baked in.

But this seems like it brings 0 value over offline, except skipping a 30 seconds install, once.

0 comments

coldtea4y ago

>But they can do that just as easily today with the vscode app. The fact that this runs in your browser does not help (or hinder) at all: As you said, offline VSCode is just a glorified browser.

On the contrary, it does help a lot. Offline VSCode might be just a glorified broswer, but web VSCode will hook automatically with the vendors development/build/code repo backends. And you could have the appropriate environment (eg. a linux version x, with y libs, and z servers running) per project, available everywhere you go with no setup of your own.

>presumably they would have to give you a laptop to access it, and any laptop that can run it in the browser can run it offline, this is 99% the same codebase.

Yes, and then you can install this or that, diverge from the common environment, and so on. And you have to setup all of those, even if it's just some docker instance running locally or some cloud stuff you access.

With the bundled web-vscode+cloud-backend, you wont have to.

>Codespaces makes sense because you don't even have to clone your code, and the compute/build happens elsewhere. Plus collaborative features can be added with no hassle because authentication is already baked in.

Codespaces is the whole idea behind this too. In other words, this is just a component of codespaces / a codespaces type deal.

sailingparrotOP4y ago

> web VSCode will hook automatically with the vendors development/build/code repo backends. And you could have the appropriate environment (eg. a linux version x, with y libs, and z servers running) per project, available everywhere you go with no setup of your own.

But again, that is codespaces. They have rolled this out months ago, and it does exactly what you are talking about, with vscode in the web and all. And I agree that it makes sense.

Vscode.dev looks like it could have been an early prototype of codespaces, with 10% of the features. So I still don't understand why this is coming out after codespaces is already in production.

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