Developer onboarding experience with CodeSpaces

Introduction

The project needs to increase velocity and a new developer arrives in the team. Now is typically the time where all chaos begins, as this person needs to be onboarded with the full toolchain linked to the project. Sound familiar? It does to me at least. Which is one of the reasons why I love CodeSpaces! Here you can have a development environment for VS Code full configured, which can then be leveraged in a cloud hosted manner. Even with having a secure connection to your locally installed VS Code. Sounds too good to be true? Let us take a look at the step-by-step experience of onboarding a new developer!

 

Resources

In today’s post, we’ll be using some resources to get us started…

• Template repository with a starter .NET Core development environment for Codespaces, including basic system tools / extensions (like Functions, Copilot, etc)
• GitHub CodeSpaces
• GitHub Co-Pilot

 

Step-by-Step Experience

Azure API Management – What are my networking options?

Introduction

A very common discussion to have with enterprises around Azure API Management (“APIM”) is the aspect of network integration. At the end of the day, the response to that is very simple… Only the developer & premium SKU allow VNET integration. The integration is achieved by doing “injection”, which means that the service is “dedicated” to you and “the machines” are placed directly in your VNET. Azure APIM does not leverage private link (yet?)… Which then opens the next discussion, as the premium SKU is about 3,42 Euro per hour, where the basic SKU floats at about 20 Eurocent per hour. At this point, for most organizations, the cost impact will take priority over the most optimal design. Where today’s post will take a look at the various options at hand.

Update (March 2022)

Since the initial post, the ability to leverage private endpoints have been made available ; https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/api-management/private-endpoint. This concept will probably be more interesting to you than the approaches mentioned in this post!

Flavors / Tiers

When taking a look at the pricing info, you will notice there are multiple flavors you can choose from ;

• The consumption tier is the one where you are charged for the amount of calls you make. It is an awesome model in terms of linking your business outcome to the cost model at hand. The downside is, that is does not offer a developer portal or any typical enterprise features (like VNET integration or a self-hosted gateway).
• The basic and standard tiers are economic tiers at both about 45 and 130 Euros per month. They do include a developer portal.
• The developer and premium tiers are the ones typically picked by enterprises due to their VNET integration, HA/DR options (for Premium) and the self-hosted gateway.

Visual Studio Licensing Explained

Introduction

The objective behind today’s post, is to serve as an overview for all those who want to learn more on Visual Studio Licensing. In my role as a Specialist in the field, I have gotten a wide range of questions on the subject. These range from license specific exceptions, towards benefits and ending up in full range license optimization exercises.

 

Visual Studio Editions

In terms of Visual Studio, there are currently four editions used ;

• Visual Studio Code
• Visual Studio Community
• Visual Studio Professional
• Visual Studio Enterprise

Where Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Community are free, they do differ quite from the others. Where we will go into the detail of those in more detail individually. To get a full feature comparison between Community, Professional & Enterprise, do check out this page ; https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/compare/

 

Product Terms

Looking for the product terms? You can find them here ; https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/terms/productoffering/VisualStudioSubscriptions/EAEAS