Visual Studio Code 1.7.1
code.visualstudio.com
code.visualstudio.com
And a lot of the features are cool, however I really like:
| Help > Keyboard Shortcuts Reference brings up a printable PDF reference sheet of VS Code command keyboard shortcuts. Keep this reference handy and you'll be a VS Code power user in no time.
It's great strategic marketing. Making Visual Studio Code costs a fraction of what Microsoft spent on the Surface RT marketing campaign (as an example), and the benefits to their image are much more powerful and long-lasting.
The Microsoft brand has been completely reborn in the eyes of developers over the past few years. The lows of 2007-2010 seem a distant memory.
Yeah, it's clear they're trying to "save face" in front of the open source community and become more developer-friendly (Bash on Windows too).
But I must say, ten years ago when I had to choose between Java and C# for a SCADA project I picked the latter because of the Visual Studio IDE which was already well above the competition (think Eclipse/NetBeans back then).
I'm glad they've brought it back for all open source software.
The long term play is azure which is their big money maker. 1/3 of deploys on azure (IIRC) use linux images. Our startup got a huge credit to host on azure and we don't use .NET nor Windows. Competition is good.
Companies understand. It's just that making something that people truely like is expensive, takes a long time and is risky.
Marketing (in many instances) is cheaper, faster and less risky. Also, it's something you can do with 3rd party providers who do this for many companies. In other words, it's a business problem that can be solved by basically throwing money at it.
Building something usually takes insight into the customer, knowledge on how to build the thing that people want and ongoing work at maintaining that thing that makes people so happy. All of this takes a great amount of internal talent, skill and leadership. If the wrong few key people leave, if the corporate culture changes, if the winds of the stock market and profits shift, this can go away. It's much, much easier to just rebrand your way into people's good graces.
Ultimately, if you end up using Linux .net core + typescript, they seem to be killing off visual studio, IIS, Windows Server, etc.
For what? Azure, glorified hosting that might end up a race to the bottom vs AWS & GCE? Selling SQL server licences?
I just don't get the strategy. I'm genuinely asking, where is this actually taking them apart from burning a bunch of money making free tools? Why are they making .Net core?
Microsoft has traditionally been the one to get the hate for this because their moves were so brash in the '90s... But the other big tech companies aren't any better. Apple is a friend of open source and standards only when it happens to suit them. Google does lots of open source but they want to be the ones holding the reins at all tiems (Blink, Android, etc.) Facebook spends a lot of money on looking smart and friendly to developers so that we'd ignore the Orwellian pile of information they hold on most people. Etc.
Microsoft was working on Microsoft OS/2 NT 3.0 when they broke off from IBM, and then renamed it Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 using the Windows 3.X GUI. Microsoft also pushed Windows 3.0 and 3.1 that loaded on top of DOS. IBM had OS/2 2.0 that had WIN-OS2 to run 16 bit Windows apps. Then companies quit making OS/2 native apps and made 16 bit Windows apps instead because OS/2 could run them as did Windows.
The big blow to IBM was Microsoft's Windows Tax to OEMs, that is based on how many computers they made, even if Windows was not installed on the new PCs. So if someone wanted to install IBM's OS/2 or Next's Nextstep for Intel chips, or BeOS for Intel, they still had to pay Microsoft the Windows tax. This forced OEMs to preinstall Windows, because they already paid for it with the Windows tax.
So it was a combination of OS/2 running 16 bit Windows programs and companies not wanting to make an OS/2 native version, and Microsoft marketing Windows to be used instead of OS/2 by bundling it with every OEM PC sold, that stabbed IBM in the back over OS/2.
Yes, Microsoft in the 1990s were ruthless and even bundled Internet Explorer with Windows 95 OSR and Windows 98 that got them investigated by the DOJ for antitrust issues.
Which language do your backend guys use VSCode for?
I believe Sublime is a superior product in terms of performance and stability.
Reasons for switching back:
1 - Atom has some long-standing bugs that compromise its usability (e.g. there is a bug where you basically can't scale down a window after it was maximised: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10720 )
2 - Atom is slower, you may think a fraction of a second when opening a file or doing a search should not make much of a difference but, when you are using an editor every day for many hours, it ends up affecting your productivity.
PS I liked VS Code but it's different enough from the other 2 editors that it would take time for me to become proficient with it. I especially liked VS Code's debugging features.
Yet. Little by little, rather than invest in windows-only vstudio, they'll enhance code until it's building all the same stuff as studio and then they'll announce how amazing code is and stop talking about studio alltogether.
When MS ghosts a product, you know what its future is.
And if you want to embed Atom within an application, it's great that they've finally updated to make apm use npm 3 so the path lengths don't exceed 260 characters. That's a dumb Windows limitation, but until Microsoft fixes it and enterprises actually update to the version with the fix then it's a fact of life. But atom internally still uses the old nested layout for the built-in modules, so you can't install "portable" atom in a top-level path longer than a few dozen characters.
The very people using Azure are the people MS are going out to burn with all this focus on the new stuff, the people invested in their stack are getting heavily burnt by churn and the substandard performance of .net core. One of the great things about C#/ASP.Net is that it was improving constantly, they've basically put that on hold for 2-4 years while they try and support linux. And for what? ASP.Net/C# was basically a much faster, better tooled, statically typed Rails.
There was a discussion here of what all the HN startups were using the free azure credits for and the consensus was basically "anything non-critical, log parsing, azure is terrible". One of the GCE guys replied to one of my comments about consistent latency of 3-5ms between website instances and SQL instances on azure with basically "ours is much better, 100ns latency, we're now beta-ing SQL Server". With .net core MS have basically opened up the C# space to be eaten by AWS + GCE.
And the recent terrible re-write of Azure web interface hasn't got anyone's hopes up of improvements any time soon.
Azure is the obvious one.
Enterprise Javascript is basically:
1. Javascript is probably the most popular programming language at the moment (or at least top 3).
2. Since the creation of Node Javascript has entered the realm of back end services applications.
3. There's a lot of Javascript being written these days, and those lines of code will have to be maintained.
4. A large enterprise will need good tools from a solid, respected vendor, preferably one that has a great image in the developer community.
5. These tools, Open Source but beefed up with enterprise extensions, will cost $$$.
Microsoft was losing the back end completely, on the long term. It has already lost the frond end: web, Android, iOS. Now it's clawing its way back with its back end stacks or at least with tools meant for Open Source stacks.
Mark my words, after this huge flurry of development to mark Visual Studio Code as the leading cross platform "light IDE" (ahead of Sublime, Atom and maybe even ahead of some "heavy IDEs" such as Eclipse or Netbeans), Microsoft will release proprietary extensions, especially things targeting big enterprises.
In my eyes, this is a win-win situation. Microsoft still makes money, developers don't get EEEd like in the bad old 90s, etc.
Maintained and supported. How many JS libraries have developers jumped on, only to see them die a few years later? Backbone JS is the first that comes to mind.
Everybody was using it, but since then, it's pretty much fallen by the wayside and there is still a ton of Backbone code out there that needs maintaining until those projects can transition to something else.
Having a larger enterprise company maintain a library like Typescript when you know its going to be stable and maintained for some time as opposed to a smaller library where the creator just decides to pack it up and leave everybody hanging just seems like a smarter move to me.
It may be less flavour of the month, but that seems par for the course with JS frameworks.
I guess on Jeremy Ashkenas twitter feed he called Backbone "finished" in terms of API and feature set after the 1.0 version. When you look at the contributions graph, its practically non-existent: https://github.com/jashkenas/backbone/graphs/contributors
Add in the Google trends graph compared to Angular and React: https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=backbone%20js,angula...
Then when you look at the other libraries in the ecosystem, its like a ghost town.
backbone.forms - Open Issues: 172, Issues closed in 2016: 14, Last Release: Jan 21, 2016
backbone.localstorage - Open Issues: 45, Issues closed in 2016: 1, Last Release: Jan 22 2015
backbone.paginator - Open Issues: 20, Issues closed in 2016: 7+, Last Release: Feb 3 2016
backbone.validation -Open Issues: 79, Issues closed in 2016: 1, Last Release: May 8 2015
So not only is interest waning, the creator has called the library "finished" with not much more in terms of features coming and the ecosystem surrounding Backbone has all but dried up. I would be hard pressed to say it still has a bright future.
Yup.
Kill it all- transition it to linux, put linux on azure, or build systems on azure profit / rent-seeking.
vsCode only exists because vstudio isn't multiplatform and never will be but they need multiplatform in order to make their slice of the cloud revenue larger.
You can still use Visual Studio to build everything, and many will continue to do so, over VSCode. IIS is free. Windows Server is the only thing that they might lose out on licensing but they make it up with Azure running the underlying infrastructure. SQL Server is a great database and formidable opponent to the Oracle and other enterprise options while still being available for SMBs.
Meanwhile, many developers can now be introduced to the rich .NET ecosystem and run it alongside their other open-source/linux stacks, only growing the overall exposure and tools, applications, and revenue involved for Microsoft.
Maybe in the eyes of some developers - for many of us who are still dependent on MS products that haven't been getting much attention (SQL Server and it's related BI tools), the lows are still getting lower. Sure, there's improvements in the overall functionality (with SQL 2016) - but trying to get bugs fixed (or even acknowledged) for anyone but a fortune 500 company is still an exercise in futility. Trying to get support via MSDN forums (as is a purported benefit of our multiple MSDN developer licenses) is a joke.
We're dropping any MS related tech that we can, because frankly it feels like we're throwing money away when we could be getting the same (or, most likely better) support using open source technologies instead.
I have connect issues that have been open and unacknowledged for going on 4 years now. Meanwhile, I have posted bug reports to open source projects on github and received responses back with 5 minutes of hitting submit.
VS Code is great, don't get me wrong - but the experience with that project is a far cry from the products we've PAID MS to use and develop with.
We've got some servers that would be happy to putt along on 2-4 cores, but we're struggling to find anything less than 12 cores with our managed hosting provider - so we have to pay for the extra cores, even though we don't want to use them.
"Consolidate!" - sure, but we can only do that so much. Some stuff we have to deploy regionally for latency reasons, other stuff can't share hardware for PCI compliance reasons. We don't want to have production environments sharing with dev.
I get frustration with a specific bug not getting fixed. That being said, links to the MSDN posts you've made that have gotten 0 MS attention? Because in my experience, even if the issue can't be fixed, someone at least responds letting you know they're looking into it.
Further, if you're paying for support, I've never had a bug go completely unaddressed.
What about Microsoft's investment in R and integrating it with SQLServer? Seems like at least it's a step in the right direction.
CH_ATA_ENABLE=true
then open VS Code?
I don't actually use it, but by existing and being good, it should force Sublime Text to up its game!
Firefox? Buggy. Chrome? Buggy. Any other GUI editor? Buggy. Android Studio? Buggy. XCode? Buggy. I could go on all day.
It's written in C++, too, so it's lightning fast. There's no reason UIs should be laggy in 2016 on the very highest-spec Lenovo Thinkpad mobile workstation, but that's the sad reality of anything written in Electron JS (along with zero 4K Hi-DPI support on Linux, so I have to squint to read the microscopic text on Slack, Upwork, Discord, Messenger for Desktop, Whatsie, Skype for Linux Alpha, ...).
Although it's definitely an Electron problem. My few experiences with Atom have been that it is absolutely and unacceptably slow on top hardware.
In my day-to-day usage I'm not seeing any significant performance differences between Atom and Code, but that may just be a function of my particular use cases, or it may well be that newer versions of Atom have, at least somewhat, caught up to VS Code.
Can you open arbitrarily large text files/directories in atom these days? Whenever, I open anything over a few thousand LOC atom seems to lock up for me. I was actually forced to switch from Atom to VSC, because I had a bad habit of accidentally clicking on `node_modules` in the file tree and crashing my session.
I think I see what you're saying. Maybe it's because the pixel is actually a beast, I don't notice it as much. I have VS Code installed, maybe I should give it another shot. I'm probably just used to Atom, and the only time I really used VSC I was trying to work on one of our really large .NET solutions and it just started throwing hundreds of errors at me. I should try one of my MEAN apps in it.
VS Code has been stellar for JS and Go. The ruby experience has been pretty meh. Definitely depends on language/community support.
I can only assume that leads to a very low leakyness and low memory usage.
More here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/extensions/our-approach
TypeScript 73.9% JavaScript 21.6% CSS 3.4% Inno Setup 0.8% HTML 0.2% Shell 0.1%
Although, I believe their plugin system would allow plugins to be written in any language.
My question is does anyone here use VSCode for C and C++? What is your setup? task files, etc?
I'm developing on Linux and Windows with MSYS2. Here are my config files: https://gist.github.com/jhasse/a3898302e4f8be682d053dd5e3b4b...
If you were on Linux or Mac I would recommend CLion or Qt Creator if you wanted a proper IDE. Or a heavily customized Emacs. But on Windows, I would recommend Visual Studio.
Not sure exactly how the Git integration is better? In addition to improved Git integration with the more recent VS releases there is also a GitHub extension.
VS also has multi-cursor support, if we are thinking of the same thing... editing more than one line simultaneously?
Besides, these two features you mention seem hardly to be of deciding factor, you would think something like code analysis, profiling, and better debugging (memory window, etc) would be of more importance.
I can directly see which lines have changed in VS Code on the left site of a file.
> VS also has multi-cursor support, if we are thinking of the same thing... editing more than one line simultaneously?
You can add multiple cursors by Alt + Left mouse button in VS Code. This allows to even modify multiple words in one line simultaneously.
> Besides, these two features you mention seem hardly to be of deciding factor, you would think something like code analysis, profiling, and better debugging (memory window, etc) would be of more importance.
Profiling isn't something I do every day, but code editing is. Also you can use both of them at the same time, only falling back to VS for these features.
Furthermore keep in mind, that VS is only free for commercial use under some circumstances (under 200 employees IIRC).
VS has this too. Except, by default, it is on the right side of the editor. Uncommitted is in yellow. The white "marker" or hyphen, moves with the line number your cursor is on. Just like in VS Code.
You can also see commits on each function and class, by author and date.
You can right click each commit and view details for that commit, or send an email to the author.
https://s17.postimg.org/of5tv8lcf/image.png
> You can add multiple cursors by Alt + Left mouse button in VS Code. This allows to even modify multiple words in one line simultaneously.
In VS you can hold alt + shift and use arrow keys to select the number of lines you want to edit simultaneously, but looks to not be possible to place several cursors on a single line.
Still, VS has a lot more features going for it that are very powerful. And besides, most people who argue a text editor vs IDE and place importance on text editing speed, forget that it is about quality code, not how fast you wrote that code.
The few lines of code the average developer writes a day makes text editing speed of very little importance.
Both not working for me. Are you sure that this also works with C++ code?
You have the same Git stuff (color markers) on the sides of the editor for C++. I tried both the Community edition (2015) of VS and Enterprise (15, preview 5). But, the number of references, authors, etc, above functions and classes, seems limited to C#.
Since you are already using Sublime, you might like it. It felt polished and nice to work on. An improvement over Atom IMHO.
If you have the full Visual Studio available, the experience will be superior.
Typings auto installer - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jvitor83...
I've used this extension for the last 2 months, it works great.
Other than that, it's hard not to be impressed by how quickly they made another release. Congratulations!
https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/commit/b3c10273d7ba34086...
Don't do Insider if you need a guarantee of stability.
Wasn't expecting this! I wonder if they plan HTML autocompletion within PHP. This would really speed up my work.
deb: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/2973 rpm: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/229
I'm using WebStorm mostly but I'm not "married" to any particular IDE, I've used others and I switch around relatively easily.
I'm doing a slightly different programming style when it comes to types: I don't use "no types" or TypeScript or Flow, but I do use "types", sort of. What I've done is JSDoc the hell out of my code. There is not a variable without a JSDoc or Closure compiler type annotation. Those are all just comments, so I don't need to "Babel" my code. Since I'm using the latest node.js and only those ES 2015+ features that it happens to support that is enough.
It works because the IDE (WebStorm) uses the JSDoc comments to infer types, and the IDE itself provides the equivalent of what something like Flow or TypeScript wold do.
Well - to a point. I'm not really satisfied. I always keep submitting tickets for WebStorm, and while they have solved a lot there still are too many fundamental issues with how they infer types. For example, I get offered object properties from files I don't even include in the file I'm in, not even indirectly! For example, "mocha" might have an internal (!) variable somewhere that has a property "data". Since I have a property "data" too I get the definition inferred from that mocha file, which makes no sense, since a) I'm not even in a test file that includes mocha, and b) even if I was, that is an internal variable that's not exported.
They don't seem to be able to solve this issue, and with new EAPs I often get two steps back for very hard-fought step forward. To be honest, I believe their code for inferring types in Javascript is just too messy, it seems each time they plug a hole it doesn't last long and two new ones appear.
However, when I try VStudio it seems that I only get type inference if I use TypeScript?
I would be open to using "Flow", but I really, really don't want to have a different language. I just want types and standard Javascript! Yes I know TypeScript appears pretty much the same as ES 2015, but it still rewrites my code. I would not mind, except that there really is no reason at all since ES 2015 has everything I need (I don't use classes or even prototypical inheritance, no inheritance at all, only composition and functions).
From my limited research the best albeit not quite satisfactory solution for my case still remains only WebStorm? I mean, if they fix the problems introduced with the EAP version a few weeks ago when all JSDoc based type suggestions stopped working I can live with that state.
It would be nice though if I could have a "comment based type system" (JSdoc/Closure compiler) or Flow. How would VStudio do in this scenario?
[1]: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/JSDoc-support-i...
Still, I don't want to use TypeScript for the reasons I wrote. I'm as minimalist as possible, and I don't want to use a language that changes my code to something else without any gain for me since I can write exactly what I want in ES 2015+ already. So it's just those types, and I could get them from "Flow" too and in that case keep my ES 2015+ code. Yes I know TypeScript is very close to ES 2015+, but I never know when it does change the code unless I look at the transpiled result.
EDIT: Actually, I did know that, looking at that page I remember why I dismissed it:
> Note any tags not listed explicitly below (such as @typedef, or @constructor) are not yet supported.
TypeScript doesn't change your code. If you're writing ES2015 code and targeting ES2015 emit, the output code is always exactly what you put in. There isn't any difference.
Most of Typescript's output changes when you are writing for the same version of JS that you are outputting are simply just removing the type hints from the final output.
That said, with allowJS "mixed" mode of Typescript now you can also try for a hybrid approach of JS and TS files in the same project and that hybrid approach gets more powerful and capable with each release. I think with some effort you can even get somewhat close enough to the point that you can have some Flow-like behavior by using JS for most files and .d.ts and .ts files for only the really type-dependent stuff.
I'd try a to-do app with the flow extension on vs code. Or take an existing project and incrementally add types.