GitHub Codespaces, Visual Studio Code and Remote Containers
Setting up a development environment—installing the right SDK versions, extensions, and tools—wastes hours and creates ‘works on my machine’ problems. VS Code Remote Containers and GitHub Codespaces solve this with containerised, reproducible dev environments.
What You’ll Learn
- How the VS Code Remote Containers extension connects your local editor to a Docker container running a full development environment
- The role of
devcontainer.jsonas a manifest defining your development container’s configuration, extensions, and port forwarding - How to bootstrap a .NET Core dev container using the microsoft/vscode-dev-containers repository samples
- The difference between Remote Containers (local Docker) and GitHub Codespaces (cloud-hosted containers accessible from a browser)
- Using the GitHub Codespaces VS Code extension to connect your local IDE to a cloud-hosted Codespace
- The dotfiles convention: GitHub Codespaces automatically applies your
~username/dotfilesrepository to personalise every Codespace with your aliases, shell configuration, and shortcuts - Live demo: editing, previewing, and committing changes to cloudwithchris.com (Hugo static site) entirely within a GitHub Codespace
Developer Experience Impact
GitHub Codespaces eliminates onboarding friction—any developer with browser access can contribute to a project within minutes, with a pre-configured environment including the correct language runtime, VS Code extensions, and tooling. No local setup required.
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