Good guess.

It is based on the MonoDevelop core with many new extensions to support new workloads (.NET Core, Azure Deployment, Unity development).

Additionally, over the past year we have replaced started to replace the internals of MonoDevelop with code from Visual Studio that we have been open sourcing.

In addition to what has been open sourced and integrated so far, we have a strong pipeline of additional features and capabilities that will bring even more Visual Studio code into the IDE.

We are roughly on a 6-8 weeks release cadence that aligns with the Visual Studio release cadence, so you will see various subsystems get new capabilities continuously from this point on.