Current users were invited to join the GitHub Codespaces beta.

The migration followed a phased decommissioning of the Azure-based service:

Visual Studio Codespaces officially retired on , consolidating its features into GitHub Codespaces . Microsoft made this move to simplify the developer experience by providing a native, "one-click" workflow directly within the GitHub platform where most code already resides. Key Transition Timeline

The Visual Studio Codespaces portal was fully retired, and all remaining data was deleted. Major Differences and Improvements

GitHub Codespaces initially defaults to the light GitHub theme, whereas the original service used the VS Code "Dark+" default.

While both services share the same underlying technology—VS Code running on Linux—the move to GitHub introduced several shifts:

The original Azure offering allowed for more granular manual control over instance sizes at creation, a feature that was later streamlined in the GitHub implementation . How to Migrate Code