Why Microsoft Renamed Visual Studio Online to Codespaces—and Cut Prices by 50%
Microsoft rebranded Visual Studio Online as Visual Studio Codespaces, highlighted new cloud‑hosted development features, and announced a pricing cut of over 50%, while also clarifying the product’s history and free self‑hosted environment capabilities.
Microsoft announced that Visual Studio Online has been renamed to Visual Studio Codespaces .
Visual Studio Online first appeared in May of last year, with a public preview released in November. Microsoft said they have learned valuable lessons from users and improved the cloud‑hosted development environment, prompting the rename to better reflect its purpose as a cloud‑based code space.
In addition to the name change, the pricing for Visual Studio Codespaces will be reduced by more than 50% starting next week. Details are available at the Azure pricing page.
A notable new feature is the greatly improved self‑hosted environment, which allows any computer to be registered with Codespaces and accessed via VS Code or a browser‑based editor at no cost.
The article also explains the “two‑life” history of Visual Studio Online: the first instance became Azure DevOps after being renamed from Visual Studio Team Service, and the second instance, announced in 2019 as the web version of Visual Studio Code, is now called Visual Studio Codespaces.
Programmer DD
A tinkering programmer and author of "Spring Cloud Microservices in Action"
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