The name of the "VS Code" product makes the title a little mis-leading. I thought the code for "Visual Studio" was open sourced. Turns out it's just this stripped down editor called "Visual Studio Code".
- It draws comparisons to Visual Studio- even though Code isn't really an IDE (nor is it supposed to be)
- It's really bad for SEO, searching for "how to do X in Visual Studio Code" pulls hundreds of existing posts on how to do that thing in classic VS. That's going to disrupt developer experience for both VS and Code.
- It's confusing for developers wanting to download Code, or VS; too easy to mistake one for the other.
The SEO problem is a bad one, because it gets worse as each project gets older. I'd even be ok if it were MS Code or something, but VS Code is actually a bad name.
I haven't used the integrated debugger/runtime, but it seems to be going that way...
As a straight editor though, definitely more lightweight than any IDE I've used.
Make no mistake. Microsoft is not developing Visual Studio code out of the goodness of their hearts. This is a marketing strategy to get people to move to Azure.
More likely they're developing Code to compete with Sublime Text and the like. They don't have a product in that market and Microsoft's strategy is what it's always been: gaining marketshare.
Microsoft's success is [now] defined by developers active on MS technology. It underlies the open-sourcing of technologies long held proprietary, as well as the responsiveness to developer feedback.
Long term, I suspect the theory is if MS has a majority stake in the developer market, it can start defining the technology the world runs on (again). Its more of a give-take relationship though, with MS devoting resources to the resources developers actually use.
BTW it may sound like I'm being harsh on Microsoft but actually I think their strategy is brilliant. It legitimizes Open Source in every single way and shows the world that you can make money off of it - lots of money.
Open Source developers should be rejoicing now that they have been vindicated after so many years of not being taken seriously and even being called "Communists".
They need a VP of Product Names, someone that actually cares what their products are called. '.Net' for example is a stupid name because it is practically un-googleable.
When everybody was confused enough, they did the next logical thing, they peppered the .Net suffix to all their brands, that way they could tell the DoJ it was an integral part of all their products.
They quickly reverted everything when they realized what a cluster fuck they actually created. They kept the stupid name though.