For well over a decade, Visual Studio was an iconic IDE that Microsoft stack developers used. This IDE, however, has now been surpassed in popularity by another Microsoft's code editor - Visual Studio Code.
According to the survey conducted by Stack Overflow, there were more developers using VS Code at the end of 2018 than Visual Studio. Not bad for a code editor that was first released only three years prior to this.
Despite a similar name, VS Code is very different from Visual Studio. For starters, its completely free and open-source. Also, the UI is completely different. So different, in fact, that even those programmers who are proficient in Visual Studio will have to spend some time to get used to it.
The main advantage of VS Code versus Visual Studio is that the former is not restricted to mainly Microsoft technologies. Several plugins are available for the code editor that allow programmers to write software in virtually any language, including Go and Java.
One of the main disadvantages of VS Code, however, is that it doesn't support certain technologies as well as Visual Studio does. For example, Xamarin still has a very limited support.
Also, VS Code is more of a code editor, while Visual Studio is a fully fledged IDE. Therefore certain actions that have been taken for granted by Visual Studio users, such as building certain project types, are not available directly from the UI. Instead, those need to be executed from a command line terminal.
Despite its disadvantages, VS Code has a bright future. With well over 15,000 contributors, new features and plugins are being added to the code editor at a rapid pace. Also, VS Code has been made available for all mainstream operating system. If you prefer Linux over Windows, VS Code is, pretty much, your only option for writing .NET applications.
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2018: When VS Code Eclipsed Visual Studio IDE
Published by Mobile Tech Tracker
Posted on 5 Jan 2019