What a wonderful time to be developer. I'm down here at the BUILD Conference in San Francisco and Microsoft has just launched Visual Studio Code - a code-optimized editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux and a new member of the Visual Studio Family.
Visual Studio Code (I call it VSCode, myself) is a new free developer tool. It's a code editor, but a very smart one. It's cross-platform, built with TypeScript and Electron, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Visual Studio Code has syntax highlighting for dozens of languages, the usual suspects like CoffeeScript, Python, Ruby, Jade, Clojure, Java, C++, R, Go, makefiles, shell scripts, PowerShell, bat, xml, you get the idea. It has more than just autocomplete (everyone has that, eh?) it has real IntelliSense. It also as IntelliSense for single files like HTML, CSS, LESS, SASS, and Markdown. There's a huge array of languages that Visual Studio Code supports.
IMHO, the real power of this editor is its project IntelliSense for C#, TypeScript, JavaScript/node, JSON, etc. For example, when an ASP.NET 5 application is being edited in Visual Studio Code, the IntelliSense is provided by the open source projects Roslyn and OmniSharp. This means you get actual intelligent refactoring, navigation, and lots more. Visual Studio Code's support for TypeScript is amazing because it has JavaScript and TypeScript at its heart.
Visual Studio Code has git support, diffs, interesting extensibility models through gulp, and is is a great debugger for JavaScript and Nodejs apps. They are also working on debugging support for things like the .NET Core CLR and Mono on all platforms.
This a code-focused and code-optimized lightweight tool, not a complete IDE. There's no File | New Project or visual designers. If you live and work in the command line, you'll want to check free tool out.
You can download Visual Studio Code now at http://code.visualstudio.com.
They'll be blogging at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vscode and you can email them feedback at vscodefeedback@microsoft.com and follow them at @code.
Download Visual Studio Code and check the the docs to get started. Also note the docs for ASP.NET support and Node.js support. Visual Studio Code is a preview today, but it's going to move FAST. It automatically updates and will be updating in weeks, not months.
And here's some screenshots of Visual Studio Code because it's awesome. Code what you like, how you like, on what you like, and you can run it all (by the way) in Azure. ;)
Have fun!
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