News

After Visual Studio Online Renamed 'Codespaces,' GitHub Announces 'Codespaces'

Seemingly feeling the need to stir up some more naming confusion, Microsoft-owned GitHub this week announced Codespaces -- a new cloud-hosted development environment based on Visual Studio Code -- just a week after Visual Studio Online was renamed Visual Studio Codespaces.

Although the two products are different (see the screenshots below), they use the same underlying technology.

Visual Studio Codespaces provides cloud-powered development environments, with coding done in a browser-based editor, Visual Studio Code or the flagship Visual Studio IDE.

GitHub's Codespaces provides a fully-featured, cloud-hosted dev environment -- "the full Visual Studio Code experience" -- directly within GitHub, a software development platform and code repository with an open-source focus.

While different, they're similar.

A comment on the developer-oriented social site Hacker News explains the similarities. "Codespaces uses the same underlying technology as Visual Studio Codespaces to bring a fully GitHub-native experience to our GitHub users. We've been working with multiple teams on the Visual Studio side to make this happen (I work as the product lead on Codespaces)," reads a comment from Matt Colyer.

GitHub's Codespaces
[Click on image for larger view.] GitHub's Codespaces (source: GitHub).
Visual Studio Online
[Click on image for larger view.] Visual Studio Codespaces

"Powered by Visual Studio technology, Codespaces in GitHub include a browser-based version of the full VS Code editor, with support for code completion and navigation, extensions, terminal access, and more," GitHub's Shanku Niyogi said in a May 6 blog post. "If you prefer to use your desktop IDE, you’ll be able to start a codespace in GitHub and connect to it from your desktop."

The idea is to be able to spin up dev environments within seconds, simplifying the typical experience that Niyogi said could require dozens of steps developers need to take before they can get to the fun stuff: writing code.

Available now as a limited beta -- you can apply here -- pricing for the new offering hasn't yet been finalized.

Niyogi also announced GitHub Discussions, a place where open source developers can hold conversations such as brainstorming ideas, helping new users and collaborate on best ways to use software. It's an alternative to the sometimes-cumbersome ways to do such things via issues or pull requests. This feature will be soon available in beta for public repositories.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

    New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.

  • Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.

  • VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

    The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.

  • Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

    "Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."

  • Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

    Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events