Microsoft’s plan to incorporate Visual Studio Codespaces into GitHub Codespaces

By Sarah Orie Sep 12, 2020

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Microsoft’s Visual Studio Codespaces will soon be incorporated into GitHub Codespaces, which service will provide hosted Visual Studio Code environments on GitHub, with the current Azure-based offering to be retired in February 2021.

While the Visual Studio Codespaces provide cloud-hosted development environments on Microsoft Azure, the service will be moved because the company believes that transitioning to a codespace from a repository is the most-criticized part of the workflow.

Given that the vast majority of developers preferred a native, and integrated, one-click access experience, which GitHub as the home of 50 million developers can address the issue.

How Visual Studio Codespaces will compliment GitHub Codespaces

GitHub Codespaces is currently a limited public beta, which means that developers need to apply into the program. And if a developer connect to a GitHub Codespace through the Visual Studio Code editor, it will prompt to add a GitHub account to the beta.

For an optimized experience on GitHub repos, developers can also use Git repos hosted elsewhere, such as on Microsoft Azure or Bitbucket, which requires only a few additional configurations. And the Private Preview for Visual Studio and Windows SKU support will also be moving over to GitHub as part of the service consolidation.

Albeit, Microsoft will continue to support the Private Preview in the current service until the consolidation is complete, after which all Private Preview users will then be moved to GitHub Codespaces.

How current Visual Studio Codespaces users can move to the GitHub beta?

GitHub Codespaces is still in limited public beta, therefore, there is no charge for it. The pricing for GitHub Codespaces may be announced after Codespaces gets a general availability status, which is expected later in the year.

And for a Visual Studio Codespaces user to move to the GitHub beta, there is need to provide the GitHub account you’d like to be added to GitHub Codespaces beta. Then, you will be contacted in one of the following ways, either via the form indicated in the service retirement announcement e-mail. Or upon connection to a Visual Studio Codespace, you’ll be prompted via a notification toast to provide your information.

If you are successfully added to the GitHub Codespaces beta, you’ll then be able to create a codespace from any of your GitHub repositories directly.