Dev Containers. What are they and why do you need them?

You’re onboarding a new team member, or your team recently inherited a project that uses a different SDK/framework version than your current project uses. What do you do? Install the old SDK/framework versions? Can they even be installed at the same time on the same machine? What if I told you there was a way to accomplish this with little to no effort on your part? Well, with Visual Studio Code, Docker, and the Dev Containers extension, you can. Dev containers can help you easily on-board new people to your projects, allow for cleaner machines with greater support for multiple SDKs/Framework, and be able to develop/debug/run your solution from anywhere without Visual Studio Code. Oh, and put an end to “It works on my machine”

In this talk, I’ll walk through how you can set up a dev container to support your application development, without installing the SDK/framework on your machine. I’ll show you how to get started and how you can solve the age-old problem of “It works on my machine!”. As a bonus, if your code is hosted on GitHub, I’ll show you how you can run/edit/debug your project right from GitHub.com without Visual Studio Code on your machine.

This session is rated level 100 -"Introductory/Overview".

Slide Deck

Reference Links

• JosephGuadagno.net
• jguadagno.github.io Repo
• Blog Post on DevContainers
• Docker Desktop
• Visual Studio Code
• Remote Containers Extension
• Available DevContainer Features

Interested

Would you like this talk at your event? You can send me an email. If you use Sessionize you can view the talk on Sessionize.