Github Codespaces

[danmoseley]

Hypothesis

Github Codespaces could make is substantially easier to get started and be productive in a repo.

Experiment

Success Criteria

[danmoseley]

@captainsafia is now piloting Codespaces on dotnet/runtime and dotnet/aspnet repo -- determining whether changes might be needed on VS Code side. Providing feedback to Codespaces owners.

https://github.com/captainsafia/aspnetcore/blob/safia/codespaces-review/CODESPACES-REVIEW.md

Considering whether the experience of testing within VS Code can be improved / made faster

[danmoseley]

@captainsafia has these working on dotnet/aspnetcore. Asked folks on the engineering team to give feedback. After that expect to reach out to community.

Shared learnings with VS Code folks and they helped improve the experience. Reaching out to others in C# tooling team to understand how we can optimize the testing experience.

[danmoseley]

@captainsafia could you perhaps give an update on how this is going, what feedback you've gotten so far?

@brettcannon is already using codespaces in a repo he owns -- brettcannon/python-launcher. Might be worth comparing notes @captainsafia ?

In Python conferences, it's common to have sprints for a few days afterwards where maintainers meet contributors -- and it's a challenge to get contributors productive quickly - with a variety of environments. Codespaces could help here. Brett's goal is to explore whether it is.

@RyanCavanaugh -- the Typescript repo is so straightforward to get started with that codespaces may be less necessary there.

[danmoseley]

some feedback on the aspnetcore one: https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/34436

[HongGit]

@captainsafia has created dotnet/aspnetcore#34436 asking for feedback. Already received one feedback from community.

Plan to advertise more more frequently at the community standup and on Twitter, to let people know to try it out and share feedback.

It would be helpful to find a contact on the Github code spaces team who could help, like answer questions. Or to send bug reports to.

[brettcannon]

@HongGit if you have a bug to report then let me know and I will try to track down the appropriate way to do that.

[captainsafia]

Plan to advertise more more frequently at the community standup and on Twitter, to let people know to try it out and share feedback.

Following up on this. This will be advertised on the next community livestream (August 17th).

@HongGit if you have a bug to report then let me know and I will try to track down the appropriate way to do that.

On thing I noticed is that the "postCommand" script that is running in a separate terminal instance doesn't exit out once the script has finished running. I worked around this by adding an addition exit within the startup script in https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/pull/34945.

Also, we utilize submodules in the aspnetcore repo but Codespaces doesn't pull those in my default. We end up having to update the clone with the submodules in the post-create script. Is there a config option for cloning a repo with submodules? If not, I think it would be a worth while feature to include.

[brettcannon]

@captainsafia I'll ping you internally with some links

[captainsafia]

Update: publicized this via a Tweet that was shared on the @aspnet Twitter account: https://twitter.com/captainsafia/status/1428055311621914630?s=20

So far at least one positive reaction. We'll monitor for any other feedback from the community on this.

Selfishly: I've been enjoying how productive I've been with Codespaces. With a bit of polish, it'll be pretty robust. Wish there was a way to get a Windows-backed Codespace...