Uno Platform now provides integration with GitPod, the online development environment based on Theia (Alternative to VS Code) and Linux Docker containers. This blog is a part of our Uno Platform 2.0 RELOADED blog series which highlights major pieces of our January release – read on!
GitPod gives the ability for developers to get a friction free starter experience right from the browser, as nothing needs to be installed to begin developing. In the context of Uno, this means that developing a WebAssembly application can be done entirely in a browser, with a functional code editor, C# compiler and Hot Reload experience.
GitPod also provides a “pre-build” environment, where given a set of commands to execute, an already built environment is provided to the developer, saving precious time to start developing and testing an application.
This scenario has two purposes. First, it enables a quicker start-to-develop experience, where nothing must be done aside from starting the app. Second, it enables hot pull-request reviews, when GitPod is pre-building pull requests code that is then ready to review without having to build anything. I cannot count the times where reviewing some PR code without running it may have missed critical issues.
To give you a sense of the time saved, on the Uno project itself, the pre-build is saving around 15 minutes of your time to review a PR.
How to get started – Let’s try doing some XAML Hot Reload Magic
- Open Uno Quick Start repository in GitHub by clicking this link.
- In the tab named XAML Hot Reload server, run build/gitpod/serve-remote-control.sh
- In the tab named SampleApp Static Files Server, run build/gitpod/serve-sampleapp-wasm.sh
- The Live Preview window will open with the running application.
- To change some XAML content:
- Open the src/MyApp.Shared/MainPage.xaml
- Make some changes, such as Hello, world! to Hello, Uno!
- Hit Ctrl+S, see that the live preview has changed !
Next Steps
If you are new to the Uno Platform, you may want to run through the Getting Started tutorial. This will ensure you have the correct environment set up and that you have the latest release of Uno. If you have already worked with Uno, you may want to update your Uno package via your Visual Studio NuGet package manager.
If you prefer to just play with GitPod, just click on GitPod icon anywhere in our examples. Try first with Hello World from our QuickStart. 
