Ignite 2019: Visual Studio Online launches, dev updates announced

Microsoft has unloaded a truckload of new product announcements at this year’s Ignite, including a launch date for Edge Chromium, new integration for the Power Platform including a newly renamed Flow (it’s Power Automate now), new tools for Microsoft Teams, and a new service from Azure called Arc, which lets IT pros manage cloud services across cloud platforms (read: on AWS). Microsoft seems intent on broadening the scope of Ignite as the scope of IT itself broadens, not being shy about Surface product placements and developer focused news.

Along that front, Microsoft made two significant dev related announcements today. First up is that Visual Studio Online has launched. This extension of Visual Studio Code Remote Development allows devs to work from anywhere there’s a browser. Trends in today’s development environment heading towards more remote and freelance work, with more collaboration, and working with cloud based workloads that don’t require a powerful dev machine, and Visual Studio Online is built to handle that new way of working. You can learn more about Visual Studio Online over at Microsoft Docs, and try it out now in the browser, connected via Visual Studio Code, or with the Visual Studio Private Preview.

In addition, Microsoft took time to point out some recent enhancements for developers, including the Alpha of WinUI 3, the developer implications of Edge Chromium nearing launch, and improvements to WSL2 (the Windows Subsystem for Linux). You can read more about all of the latest developer news on Kevin Gallo’s blog post.