The big news a few weeks back was the announcement by Microsoft that they now had a fully featured VS Code IDE that runs completely in the browser. This was exciting news for folks who liked the idea of being able to code anywhere, whether on a Chromebook or an iPad or their Tesla display (maybe, honestly haven’t tried that one). In any case, the excitement and hype quickly gave way to the dreaded “but” as limitations on what this new IDE could do came to light.

The first and biggest limit is that a huge number of the extensions you use everyday in your VSCode environment simply don’t work. GitLens? Nope. Ilya’s CFML extension? Not supported. Tag complete extensions? Thin on the ground. And to add confusion to injury, some extensions will show the “install” button but then fail with a “not supported in VS Code Dev” error. Boo.

Let’s back up a sec and ask, do we even want to use VS Code online? Well, it kind of depends, but generally a strong yes. If you sit at the same desktop Windows machine all the time and code in a local filesystem then… ok maybe not a good contender. But if you switch machines, switch locations, use repos like Github, etc, then you might be a good candidate. VSCode.dev automatically integrates with Github and can target nearly any other Git repository very much like the desktop version. But since you’re moving around from machine to machine, ensuring that Git is your primary source of truth in your codebase is even more critical. And of course I know that’s how it should be, always, but I’ve seen Git used far too many times as a “save game” spot rather than a smooth development workflow tool.

So great Github integration? Check. Is the online VS Code IDE experience the same as the desktop? It really is, which is not a huge surprise given that VSCode was written from the start as a PWA. It really was just a matter of time before Microsoft went for the fully online play.

Drawbacks? Well, we mentioned the lack of extensions (though as time goes on, this should be rectified somewhat as folks refactor their code into web components). Another potential issue is that using VSCode.dev requires you to grant local file system access to the browser. Is it a standard? Sure, supported by most modern browsers. Is it secure? Sure, so far as that goes. But the question remains, does granting local file access to a remote service such as this IDE through the browser violate access permission security rules at your company? At my previous University employer, absolutely. 100% violation going by the letter of their rules. It basically ends around any other security they have installed via firewall, border lockdown, etc. Would it be short-sighted for a University to block this site. Very much, yes. Will someone do it? I’d bet money on it. Security rules will need to catch up to technology, as they always do.

Let’s for the moment say you want to go and give this a run. What do you do?

Well, first head over to https://vscode.dev. You’ll get a very familiar page that asks you to start a new file, open a file, open a folder or open a repo.

Before you go starting something, hit the “extensions” button on the left (it looks like 4 squares where one is making a break for it). You can search for your favorites, but honestly I had little luck. One extension I did find was ColdFusion by SketchPunk. Now, I usually don’t use this one (it gets a whopping 1.5 stars) but beggars can’t be choosy and in the case it was the only CFML related extension I found that did much of anything AND was supported on VS Code online. It is 6 years old and fairly limited on functionality, but it does color code my CFML and did complete tags for me, so I’ll be sticking with that online for the moment. The CF engineering team is looking into options on how we can make the new VSCode ColdFusion Extension have at least some functionality on the web (likely will require a web-only version unfortunately).

Once you’ve got some extensions together, go play! Make a new file, open a local folder, open a repo, have fun. Give it a try in your phone! (honestly, it is kind of awful in such a small space without an external keyboard). And then let me know your favorite extensions that work online for doing CFML dev in the comments!