Kendra Havens on Codespaces - Episode 121

Dec 28, 2020

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This week, Kendra Havens is joining the podcast! Kendra is a Program Manager at Microsoft on the .NET and Visual Studio team. She is incredibly passionate about using technology to empower people and solve the world's problems whether it be technological, business, or people puzzles — and she always loves a good challenge! In her role at Microsoft, she focuses mainly on .NET Tooling and the testing experience in Visual Studio. You may recognize her from videos on Visual Studio, .NET Core, C#, and Testing tools; or, as a speaker at the recent .NET Conf 2020.

In this episode, Kendra and Jeffrey discuss Codespaces. If you haven’t heard the buzz about Codespaces yet, they provide a fully managed dev environment that you can deploy. They’re reproducible, re-deployable, manageable, and set up everything in your dev environment for you. Kendra equates them to a remote desktop… but better!

Kendra shares her insights and knowledge on Codespaces, what she and her team are currently working on with regards to it, shares some recent developments, and much more!

Topics of Discussion:

[:38] Be sure to visit AzureDevOps.Show for past episodes and show notes.

[1:02] About The Azure DevOps Podcast and Jeffrey’s offer to speak at virtual user groups.

[1:16] Clear Measure is hiring! Be sure to check out the link in the show notes.

[1:43] About today’s guest, Kendra Havens!

[2:19] Jeffrey welcomes Kendra to the podcast.

[2:26] Kendra speaks about her career path that has led her to her current role with Microsoft and what Codespaces is.

[4:30] Is Codespaces 100% ready to go? How easy is it to set up?

[6:57] Does it matter if the software is targeting the full operating system on the Windows side or if the developer doesn’t care and is just throwing it to Azure App Service? Is there a difference between the two when it comes to implementing Codespaces?

[8:08] Is the best experience right now with what’s in development for .NET 5 container-destined applications?

[8:48] What to do if you want to run a .NET 5.0 app.

[9:03] Which application dependencies has Kendra seen as being the most common that are well-supported?

[10:10] Would it be fair to say that if something can be set up with a command line that it probably works well at this point?

[10:48] Having they been testing with SQL Server or is it implicitly supported with Codespaces?

[11:57] Kendra speaks about the overall vision for Codespaces, what they’re working towards, and the kinds of conversations that they’re having within Microsoft around it.

[15:29] Is Microsoft planning on hosting Codespaces or is there going to be a private capacity that is available if you want to equip your company with a certain amount of horsepower to connect to?

[17:26] A word from Azure DevOps Podcast’s sponsor: Clear Measure.

[17:59] Kendra speaks about the potential of configuration in regards to servicing

[19:13] What Codespaces is working towards offering: being able to configure how much horsepower your codespace gets.

[19:49] Some of the big benefits that will come from this offering.

[20:26] What clients are they intending to support with Codespaces?

[21:59] Kendra speaks about something she is currently really excited about: GitHub Actions.

[22:39] Some of the recent developments with GitHub Actions.

[24:14] The latest in testing in Visual Studio.

[26:00] How does Kendra keep up with all of the new framework changes? What’s the strategy for testing the new frameworks?

[29:51] Kendra shares some final words about what she and her team are working on and what she is excited about going forward.

[32:28] Jeffrey thanks Kendra for joining the podcast!

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