Microsoft has tossed its hat into the increasingly crowded ring of code-anywhere developer tools with a private preview of Visual Studio Code Server.
The
product follows the Remote Development extensions for Visual Studio Code, which permitted apps to be developed using a local copy of the IDE and a "remote" Windows Subsystem for Linux. Running on machines managed over SSH followed a year later and most recently GitHub Codespaces and
Visual Studio Code for the Web turned up. While the latter two require surrender to the tender mercies of Microsoft or its code-shack GitHub, the release of Visual Studio Code Server (the backend service that makes the magic happen) means that you can pop the server on your developer workstation (or Virtual Machine in the cloud) and run it through the browser using Visual Studio Code for the Web without faffing around with SSH or HTTPS, "although you can do that if you want as well," Microsoft added.
It opens up the possibility of using a browser on a machine that does not enjoy native Visual Studio Code support, connected to a machine running Visual Studio Code Server.
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