Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code

What is Visual Studio Code ?

Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is the new addition to the Visual Studio family.

Visual Studio Code is a free, lightweight, super fast, cross platform development tool for building Web applications. It works well with both Node and ASP.NET 5 apps, to manage your HTML5, JavaScript, CSS and LESS files.

Angular app in Visual Studio Code

Not your typical Visual Studio…

VSCode is not here to replace Visual Studio. It is in fact quite a different tool…

VSCode is an editor, whereas Visual Studio is an IDE.

It is like if they extracted the code editor from Visual Studio to make it into a new lightweight tool!

Main features are:

  • Rich code editor (code completion, navigation, code understanding, refactoring)
  • Debugging
  • Deployment
  • Git source control integration

See, not tons of features here, just the essential, and very well done.

I’ve been using early builds for a few days, mostly on AngularJS apps and I really like it.

it offers an insanely fast keyboard-centric coding experience, without the complexity of a full blown IDE.

You get the power of Roslyn for code analysis, and nice editor features like codelens-style reference counts and peek definition!


VSCode is for Modern Web developers

It is done for people who like to code fast, in a console-line environment, most of the time with keyboard only.

If you like: click, file, new “Add New Item” dialog box, then you might not want such a tool.

VSCode has no project files, no sln solution either…  it works right from a folder.

Typical Visual Studio devs will find VSCode very disturbing at first.

The main target is obviously modern web developers who are using Sublime text or Atom and a terminal with tools like Node, Bower, Yeoman,Grunt/Gulp, … and I think they will love VSCode, because I saved the best for the end:

Visual Studio Code is free and available on Windows, MAC and Linux!

Download it now.

Great job Microsoft.

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