Azure Cloud Shell Now Has a Graphical Code Editor -- Redmondmag.com

Azure Cloud Shell Now Has a Graphical Code Editor

By Kurt Mackie
07/19/2018

Microsoft this week added a preview of a graphical code editor within its Azure Cloud Shell developer tools.

Azure Cloud Shell, launched last year, has been notable so far as being a collection of command line-based developer tools that are accessible anywhere through an authenticated browser. User can access the Azure Cloud Shell from the "Azure portal, shell.azure.com, Azure mobile app, Azure docs (e.g., Azure CLI 2.0) and VS Code Azure Account extension," according to Microsoft's description.

On Tuesday, though, Microsoft announced that Azure Cloud Shell now uses the same Project Monaco open source code editor that's found in Visual Studio Code, according to an announcement by Brendan Burns, a Distinguished Engineer for Microsoft Azure.

With the Monaco addition, developers now have access to features such as "syntax coloring, auto completion and code snippets" in Azure Cloud Shell, Burns added. In addition, users can just type "code ." to open the file explorer from any Web browser experience that uses Azure Cloud Shell. Burns also indicated that Azure Cloud Shell now has support for various open source tools, such Terraform, Ansible and InSpec.

The Monaco graphical tooling originally found its way into Visual Studio Code because of the work of Eric Gamma, a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, who was formerly an IBM technical lead on Java dev tools for the Eclipse IDE. Gamma had been recruited by Microsoft from IBM back in 2011 to build "a subset of Visual Studio" that would work in various browsers, according to a ZDNet article by veteran Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley.

The Azure Cloud Shell currently supports various languages, such as Go, Java, .NET, Node.js and Python. Back in November, Microsoft added the Bash command-line interface for Linux systems into Azure Cloud Shell. The shell also has support for the PowerShell command-line interface, but it's still at the preview stage. The shell is housed on Azure infrastructure and is free to use except that it requires having an Azure Files account, which incurs monthly storage and data transfer costs. The Azure Files account is needed to add persistent file storage.

In other Azure DevOps news, Microsoft announced last week that its Azure DevOps Projects had reached the "general availability" stage, meaning it's commercially available. Azure DevOps Projects is a continuous integration and continuous delivery solution for bringing code (Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python or static Web site code) to Azure using Visual Studio Team Services. Microsoft also added support in Azure DevOps Projects for the Go and Ruby languages.

Users can start a project using Azure DevOps Projects from within the Azure Portal. It'll deliver all of the Azure resources needed for a project, along with a Git repository and a dashboard for monitoring. It's also possible to monitor projects using an integration with Microsoft's Application Insights service. Azure DevOps Projects supports Web app deployments, along with the "Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Service Fabric Mesh, Virtual Machines and Azure SQL Database," according to Microsoft's announcement.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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