Interestingly it is not based on Microsoft’s. VSC is relatively new it was released in April 2016 only a year after Microsoft announced it at the annual Microsoft Build Conference. Of course, Microsoft have some history with this sort of thing as illustrated by the unrelated Skype and Skype for Business! When was it created?

It also probably put some non-Visual Studio developers off using it (initially at least). This worked to some extent but was also confusing as VSC did not look anything like Visual Studio. It meant that developers who were used to using Visual Studio, tended to take a look at the new kid on the block, to see what the difference was. So why would Microsoft do this? The answer of course is marketing. In what way are VSC and Visual Studio related? The short answer is not very much at all, apart from sharing the family name. One question that this can raise is ‘why the name?’. That is, those developers who might not choose to use a Microsoft product and might otherwise choose to use tools such as Sublime Text, Atom (or indeed even old-school editors such as Vim or Emacs). So why develop another tool that, at least some extent, is a rival to its own product? Part of the answer is that they wanted to be attractive to non-Microsoft Windows developers. It should be remembered that Microsoft already had a very successful and well-established IDE called (confusingly) Visual Studio. Support for other languages including C#, Java, Python and Go, can be provided using an extensive range of plugins. It provides out of the box support for several languages including JavaScript and TypeScript and related technologies such as JSON, HTML and CSS. It allows colour coding of syntax, intelligent code completions (IntelliSense), code reformatting / refactoring - and it works very well with git.

Not only is Visual Studio Code (aka VSC), free, open-source, fast and light weight it is also cross platform, reliable and extensible. One of the most notable successes of the last four years has been the meteoric rise of the Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor.įrom initial release it has swiftly become the de-facto Integrated Development Environment (or IDE) for the majority of developers - that's an enviable level of market dominance.

Atom vs visual studio code usage 2017