Microsoft has changed the name of Visual Studio Online to Visual Studio Codespaces. The reasoning is to make it clear that this is more than just an editor in the browser. Along with the new name, Microsoft says it has added new features and lowered prices.

Visual Studio Online was announced at Microsoft Build back in November 2019, when Microsoft said that given Visual Studio Online is based on Visual Studio Code, it would gain the advantage of working with all the extensions that have been developed for Code.

According to a post on the Visual Studio blog, developers have told Microsoft that “the capabilities of this cloud-hosted dev environment make it the space where I want to write all my code“, and

"To better align with that sentiment, and the true value of the service, we’re renaming Visual Studio Online to Visual Studio Codespaces."

Cynics might wonder whether the rename really comes from the fact that developers are confusing Visual Studio Online (based on Visual Studio Code) with the old Visual Studio Online, a set of cloud services for users of Visual Studio that was previously known as Team Foundation Studio.

Alongside the new name, Microsoft has announced lower pricing. Codespaces is charged by time and resources, and the price per hour of a standard space with four cores and eight GB of RAM is dropping from $0.45  per hour to $0.17. Microsoft is also adding a new 'Basic' instance type with two virtual cores, four GB RAM, and 64 GB of SSD storage that will cost $0.08 per hour.

There are some new(ish) features added to the renamed environment. The ability to use your own Dockerfiles or images either by pointing at an image from a registry like Docker Hub, or by placing a custom Dockerfile in your repository, was added a couple of months ago. More recently, Microsoft added the ability to change the instance size of your environment, so you can spend the majority of your time in a lower powered, lower cost environment and then “upgrade the horsepower” only if and when you need to – without losing state or having to create a new environment.

More Information

Visual Studio Codespaces

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