Visual Studio Online is back and it is an editor this time!

Visual Studio Online is back. Unlike the previous usage of this name, which was an incarnation of what is now Azure DevOps Services, this is actually an editor for code. Just like you might expect it to be!

The new VSO, which is currently in preview, is a service running in Azure that allows you to in effect run Visual Studio Code on a Linux VM. 

Once you have signed into VSO with an MSA and it has created the required Resource Group and VSO Plan in your Azure subscription, you create one or more ‘environments’ that defines the size of the VM to use and which GitHub hosted repo the environment will edit.

You then start your environment and get the editor experience you would expect from Visual Studio Code running on a Linux instance, but in your browser.

This certainly opens more use-cases for editing of code that is too complex for the GitHub in browser editing experience, but you don’t want to keep a full local development setup.

Only time will tell how much I use it, but it looks interesting