Need to quickly prototype a new feature or perform some short-term tasks (like reviewing pull requests)? Create a Codespace! Your Codespaces are simply the most productive place to code.”

(It’s true what they say, naming is hard!) Do you want a great experience working on your long-term project? Do it in a Codespace. “To better align with that sentiment, and the true value of the service, we’re renaming Visual Studio Online to Visual Studio Codespaces. In today’s announcement, Microsoft’s Nik Molnar points out that the company learned that most developers who used Visual Studio Online thought of it as being much more than simply an editor in the browser. It’s also dropping the price of the service by more than 50% and giving developers the option to run it on relatively low-performance virtual machines that will start at $0.08 per hour.

Today, the company announced that it is changing the name of this service to Visual Studio Codespaces. It’s basically a full code editor and hosted environment that lives in your browser. About a year ago, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online, its online code editor based on the popular Visual Studio Code project.

Online visual studio code editor