What is Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is new light weight free editor from Microsoft initially launched as a beta version around a year ago. Since then it has come by leaps and bounds and evolved into a truly cross-platform editor with loads of features.

Since it's introduction more than 2 millions developers have installed the code and these days there are around 500,000 active users for the application. And in April 2016, Code came out of beta and version 1.0 was released worldwide. It's available for download from code.visualstudio.com and supports upto 9 langugages. As I mentioned earlier Visual Studio is cross-platform tool and native versions are available for Linux and Mac. 

Visual Studio Code was initially targeted developers who were working on TypeScipt and Javascript. But when the product was made extensible and delivered to the community, they quickly created a lot of extentions that supports most of the languages and runtimes.VS Code is fully accesible, with full keyboard navigation, screen reading and accesible navigation for visually impared developers.

By January, the team made the source code for VS Code and hosted publically in GitHub, more than 300+ pull requests were consumed.

Picture courtesy : VS Code Blog

The editor is used is VS Code is used in variety of applications like the one we see in OneDrive, Visual Studio Team Services, Bing Code Search and is used by lot of developers. Apart from that it's also part of the Developer Tools found in Microsoft Edge, the all new browser shipped with Windows 10.

The editor has got a lot of features like IntelliSense for code completion, Peek Definition to look into the function definition without navigating to the function, code refactoring etc. Support for langugages like CoffeScript, Python, Powershell, Java, Go etc brought in tons of developers to VS Code. You can refer here for the complete list of supported langaugages

Integration with Git is baked right into VS Code which helps developers to do all git operations from right inside the editor itself. You can initialize a new repository, do check in and check outs right inside from the editor itself.

Also the developers can install a lot of extension in VS Code from the marketplace, which is at https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/#VSCode

In the series of post coming up on the blog, I will blogging about installing VS Code, editor and it's features etc.

Till then Happy Coding !!!