Visual Studio Online Monaco Code Editor Walk-through - Part 1

In this post series I will show you how we can take advantage of Visual Studio Online “Monaco” to edit codes (HTML, CSS, C#, JavaScript etc) in the browser out of the box.

 With official launch of Visual Studio 2013, Microsoft also announced Visual Studio Online, which is the new name for what the company previously called the Team Foundation Service.

Microsoft has also announced it has launched a preview of what it currently calls "Monaco", which is for developers to create and maintain Windows Azure Websites. Harry says, "Monaco is a rich, browser based, code focused development environment optimized for the Windows Azure platform, making it easy to start building and maintaining applications for the cloud."

Now one big question, why changing the name of Team Foundation Service? Here is the reason snippets.

The name change is not due to any one change we are making today but rather an indicator that Visual Studio Online is the services component of our developer tools. It will, of course, continue to support all the kinds of development you do – Windows, Azure, Java, iOS, etc. and the IDE you need – Visual Studio, Eclipse, XCode, Android Studio, etc. But the name does indicate a continued broadening of our offering – you’ll see some more on this below if you continue to read.

Now, let’s get back to our original talk “Visual Studio Online ‘Monaco’ code editor Walkthroughs”.

Monaco Editor can be used following ways:

In this post let’s try to understand first one. Assuming you already have a published Azure Website.


Editing Deployed/Compiled Azure Website using Monaco Editor

Once we have published website, follow these steps.

Step 1: Enable Website Editing in Monaco Editor

Open Azure portal and open website that we want to edit. Then, click on ‘CONFIGURE’ tab and we will find an option ‘Edit in Visual Studio Online’, just click it to ON and save the changes, it is still in Preview mode.


Once we done, notice a new link ‘Edit in Visual Studio Online’ on ‘DASHBOARD’ tab.


Click on that link, it will open a page on new browser tab, and we will see project connected with Monaco editor.


You can see I have selected View/Home/Index.cshtml page to edit. Unlike Visual Studio desktop editor this online editor ‘Monaco’ got several features, we will discuss it later as we proceed through series.

Step 2: Using Monaco Editor

Updating CSS or HTML or JavaScript does not require build, so just select the file to edit and make necessary changes, update will take effect automatically. Here is a quick video, watch it.


So you can see how easy it is to update the website using Visual Studio Online Monaco Editor.

In this post you learned how to edit complied website, in the next post of this series we will talk about compiling/building website using Visual Studio Online Monaco Editor. So, we don’t need our laptop always with us to build and update our websites. Part 2 is here.

Hope this helps.

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