Saturday 16 April 2016

Microsoft’s free cross-platform Visual Studio Code

Microsoft has just released version 1.0 of a new, free, cross-platform development environment called Visual Studio Code. This could be of interest to just about all programmers no matter which operating system or language you are using.

Visual Studio Code supports the editing and debugging of over 100 programming languages on Windows, Linux and OS X. There are also over 1000 extensions – add-ins that extend the IDE’s capability with additional tools and language support. So whether you are programming JavaScript, C#, Ruby, Python, Java, PHP or C++, Visual Studio Code could be a useful tool to have.

Note that, in spite of its name, Visual Studio Code is a completely different product from Visual Studio. The standard version of Visual Studio has many more built-in tools (including visual interface designers) than Visual Studio Code, but it supports far fewer languages and runs only on Windows. A free ‘Community edition’ of Visual Studio For Windows is also available.

You can download a free copy of Visual Studio Code here:
https://code.visualstudio.com/