That’s Visual Studio Code’s main strength: bringing together all the tools you’re likely to need in a JavaScript-powered extensible framework, making it easy for third parties to quickly add their own extensions to the editor. With Visual Studio Code and tools like Deis’s Draft you can download and install the Seneca microservices framework, write a Node.js app, wrap it in a Docker container, and deploy it to Azure without having to leave your editor. Visual Studio Code has even added support for a command-line terminal, including the Windows Linux Subsystem, so you can use it to build and test Unix apps without having to leave your PC. With its support for IntelliSense code highlighting, it’s also now my standard code viewer for web content, and it’s where I build and test JSON and JavaScript, for working with microservices and for configuring containers. Visual Studio Code quickly became a standard part of my personal device setup, replacing Notepad as my default text editor, and its now one of the first tools I install on a new PC. Microsoft’s response took some time, but the 2015 launch of Visual Studio Code, its first cross-platform development tool, quickly got rave reviews and, more important, a rapidly growing number of users-and not only on Windows.īuilt using GitHub’s cross-platform Electron framework, Visual Studio Code is a full-featured development editor that supports a wide selection of languages and platforms, from the familiar C and C# to modern environments and languages like Go and Node.js, with parity between Windows, MacOS, and Linux releases. Visual Studio Code is the new standard for modern development Tools like GitHub’s Atom epitomize this trend, along with MacOS-only tools that have spurred a shift that’s led to row after row of glowing Apple logos in the seats at technology conferences. That’s all very well for many developers, but there’s a substantial number of developers today using a new generation of programming editors to write web and microservices code. For a giant, it moves fast, but it remains focused on building large-scale Windows applications for client PCs and for servers, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

But it has evolved over the years to support cross-platform, web, and mobile development, adding more and more features. Microsoft’s Visual Studio has long been a heavyweight Windows-only development environment.

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