Developers exposing a local server to the internet used to mean one thing: download a CLI, create an account, paste an authtoken, and bounce between your editor and a separate terminal window. Microsoft has spent the last few years narrowing that gap by building port forwarding directly into VS Code’s Ports view, backed by its Dev Tunnels service. No extension required, no separate binary - just a right-click in a panel you already have open. Read the complete article here -
That doesn’t make ngrok obsolete. It makes the choice more interesting, because the two tools have converged on similar free-tier shapes while staying different in what they’re actually built for. This piece breaks down where Dev Tunnels genuinely wins, where the popular narrative about ngrok’s free tier is outdated, and where ngrok remains the only real option.
The Cost of Context Switching
Local development in the early 2020s was fragmented: write code in VS Code, run the app in the integrated terminal, then open a second terminal to run a tunneling tool for a public HTTPS URL. Every time you needed to test a Stripe webhook or share a preview link, you left your editor, checked whether your auth token had expired, and copy-pasted URLs into someone else’s dashboard.
VS Code’s Ports view collapses that into one place. If your app is already running in the integrated terminal, forwarding a port takes a right-click, not a new tool.
