News

Visual Studio Codespaces Consolidates to GitHub Codespaces

Microsoft caused Codespaces confusion after it renamed its Visual Studio Online offering "Visual Studio Codespaces" and subsequently GitHub, owned by the company, introduced its own Codespaces.

That confusion is being addressed with today's announcement that Visual Studio Codespaces is consolidating into GitHub Codespaces.

Microsoft announced a public preview of Visual Studio Online ("cloud-hosted dev environments accessible from anywhere") last year.

"Visual Studio Online provides managed, on-demand development environments that can be used for long-term projects, to quickly prototype a new feature, or for short-term tasks like reviewing pull requests," Microsoft said. "You can work with environments from anywhere using either Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio IDE (in private preview), or the included browser-based editor."

It was then revamped and renamed Visual Studio Codespaces earlier this year amid the remote development surge caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shortly thereafter, GitHub announced its own Codespaces, 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.

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

Both used the same underlying technology.

Now, today, (Sept. 4), Microsoft said:

During the preview we've learned that transitioning from a repository to a codespace is the most critical piece of your workflow and the vast majority of you preferred a richly integrated, native, one-click experience. Since GitHub is the home of 50M developers, it made sense to partner with them to address this feedback. However, after the GitHub-native experience was released, we started hearing that the two distinct experiences were causing confusion amongst our users.

We believe that by consolidating the current Codespaces experiences into one, we can eliminate confusion, simplify the experience for everyone, and make more rapid progress to address customer feedback.

Existing Visual Studio Codespaces users can start transitioning to GitHub Codespaces now; the current Azure offering will be retired in February 2021. Other developers can request access to the GitHub Codespaces limited public beta.

So the company quashed confusion with Codespaces consolidation.

Right?

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Mastering Blazor Authentication and Authorization

    At the Visual Studio Live! @ Microsoft HQ developer conference set for August, Rockford Lhotka will explain the ins and outs of authentication across Blazor Server, WebAssembly, and .NET MAUI Hybrid apps, and show how to use identity and claims to customize application behavior through fine-grained authorization.

  • Linear Support Vector Regression from Scratch Using C# with Evolutionary Training

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the linear support vector regression (linear SVR) technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. A linear SVR model uses an unusual error/loss function and cannot be trained using standard simple techniques, and so evolutionary optimization training is used.

  • Low-Code Report Says AI Will Enhance, Not Replace DIY Dev Tools

    Along with replacing software developers and possibly killing humanity, advanced AI is seen by many as a death knell for the do-it-yourself, low-code/no-code tooling industry, but a new report belies that notion.

  • Vibe Coding with Latest Visual Studio Preview

    Microsoft's latest Visual Studio preview facilitates "vibe coding," where developers mainly use GitHub Copilot AI to do all the programming in accordance with spoken or typed instructions.

  • Steve Sanderson Previews AI App Dev: Small Models, Agents and a Blazor Voice Assistant

    Blazor creator Steve Sanderson presented a keynote at the recent NDC London 2025 conference where he previewed the future of .NET application development with smaller AI models and autonomous agents, along with showcasing a new Blazor voice assistant project demonstrating cutting-edge functionality.

Subscribe on YouTube