Visual Studio Code Editor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux Released

Jaspalsinh Chauhan -

Pretty exciting times for all developers. Microsoft is changing the course on how you can build application and not worry what platform you choose to achieve that.

Every few months and at sessions / conference we see Microsoft teams making Frameworks, Libraries and Tools open source.

As "No one is left behind, we are hearing you" is in the air you breath. .NET development / execution stack is reaching OS X and Linux. This love is growing more and more every day.

In past we saw few eye catching deals like ASP.NET 5 / MVC 6 and "Develop using your favorite editor" - OmniSharp, today at Microsoft Build 2015 developer conference Visual Studio Code Editor was announced.

One more edition of Visual Studio in the belt. This one is particular and different from the regular Visual Studio IDE that you use. It is Microsoft's offering that can be used to develop application in an platform independent way adapting cool stuffs from Visual Studio and other popular editors. Yes you heard it right it runs transperently on all three major platfrom that are used for development.

Few cool quick bits of the IDE:

  • Smaller in size ~60 MB for Windows, OS X and Linux
  • Fast startup
  • Debugging
  • GIT support
  • Cool search and command pallete
  • Support for Syntax coloring, bracket maching, Intellisense, linting, outline, refactoring, find all references
  • Split editor view mode

The editor provides project Intellisense for C#, Typescript, JavaScript, JSON, HTML, CSS, LESS, SAAS.

Many basic development features you familiar with in Visual Studio are supported in Visual Studio Code for C# and TypeScript.

Awesome support for C# and ASP.NET 5 application using Roslyn and OmniSharp.

Visual Studio Code is not build on Atom but instead build using NodeJS + Electron.

You can download your platform copy at : https://code.visualstudio.com/Download
Currently it is in Preview and promise to bring more updates in days instead of months from the team.

Team blogs at: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vscode/ so follow them to get updates.

Post your ideas and request loud at: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/293070-visual-studio-code

Following is the comparision of things Visual Studio Code supports on different platform at the time of this writing:

  • Editor left pane options > Explore, Search, GIT, Debug available on all three platform.
  • Language support for intellisense available on all three platform
  • Debugging capabilities > Currently available on WINDOWS ONLY
  • Command execution using command pallete > Currently only available on WINDOWS and OS X

It has all started now, Visual Studio Code shows good sign of productivity for development on Windows, OS X and Linux. This would also become your go-to editor for ASP.NET 5 development, but not limited to do so.

Read more - Visual Studio Code Documentation
Check out Build 2015 conference at Channel 9

Happy Coding with Visual Studio Code Editor !!