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> what's the business model behind it's development. I'm too much of a skeptic to believe it's just so developers have a warm fuzzy feeling associated with Microsoft

There are a couple things others touch on, but to expand on a few things:

1. Microsoft was formed for developers in the first place. It's first product was BASIC (for MOS 6502). Developer productivity has always been a part of Microsoft's long term vision of itself. It is entirely possible for VSCode to be developed solely to give developers warm fuzzies and for that to fit Microsoft's long term vision.

2. VSCode gently encourages you to explore other Microsoft tools and services. It's built in Typescript and makes cross-platform .NET a reality and has some useful Azure integration extensions to help you run things on Azure services. Part of the delight to VSCode is that it doesn't hard sell any of those: it offers them as opt-in tools and lets you explore them yourself. (Opinion: This is a wonderful sort of return to confidence from Microsoft that their developer tools nearly sell themselves on their own merits, Microsoft doesn't need to hard sell them.)

3. VSCode is "made out of Azure". Part of why VSCode has seemed so effortless to build was that a lot of the core pieces (particularly the Monaco code editor at the heart of VSCode was built for Azure, then reused by IE/Edge Dev Tools, VSTS, before being brought into its own in VSCode) were built for Azure itself to provide a nice development/devops environment experience in the cloud. That seems a pretty good advertisement for something like Azure when even the systems built to support the services offered are strong development tools of their own merit.

Minor correction, the first BASIC was for the MITS Altair 8800 which had an Intel 8080 CPU.

Minor correction, the first BASIC was for the GE-235. The Altair was the first home computer to have a version of BASIC, but BASIC had already been around for a decade before it was ported over.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE-200_series

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC

Meant the first MS Basic :)

It's about getting developers back on the MS platform.

e.g. if VS Code and the idea of MS supporting OSS was around 5 years ago, perhaps Windows phone might have had enough apps and been successful.

To extend on that, dotnetcore is dead in the water without a decent and supported cross-platform development experience. Visual Studio and vsmac get the job done for now, but for the long run they need something that also works on linux and is consistent across all three platforms.

VSCode and the dotnet cli tooling fill this role on Linux. The tools are consistent across all three platforms.

I've had no end of trouble using .NET on Linux in the past couple of years. Most of my existing projects are broken, too.

Were you using Mono or .NET Core/Standard?

Both at different times. My Mono projects started breaking and getting .NET Core/Standard running on anything but their blessed distros is difficult.

There are supported Docker (Linux) containers which can be used as is or extracted and come with needed libraries.

That doesn't count, not even a little bit.

Actually the C# plugin for VisualStudio Code does an amazing job supporting .NET Core (on any platform).

I stopped using VisualStudio in favor of Code in regards of .NET Core development.

I think bunder's point is that VSCode is the "something that also works on linux and is consistent across all three platforms".

Oh. Yes. Agree, it can be read like that :)

Thanks. Yeah, that was my point exactly.

> some don't like the electron-based thing/performance

It's mostly not liking Electron-based, performance is very reasonable for VSCode, I think.

As for the end-game: it's most likely luring you into Azure. Tight integration with a proper editor/IDE might give it an edge over competitors.

One very specific performance metric is startup time, and Sublime beats the pants off VSCode in that department. Creating new top-level windows in VSCode is also annoyingly slow compared to Sublime (presumably because it's spinning up a new browser context). Other than that, it seems snappy enough.

For some reason people still consider startup time a metric worth paying attention to

I use VS Code most of the time, but the reason I always use Notepad for taking quick notes _is_ the startup time of VS Code. If they improved it, I'd be using it for both. It is an important metric for some.

If I need to take a quick look at a file but don't plan on actively doing a bunch of work on it, I usually open in Sublime for the same reason.

Still get syntax highlighting and everything, but waiting for VS Code can be long enough to derail my train of thought.

I work in IntelliJ IDEA whise startup times are horrible. However, since I always work on a set of projects, I never close them, so, essentially, startup time is 0.

Also, IDEA has scratch files for quick notes available through a shortcut (I guess VS Code might have a similar plugin), so startup tome isn’t an issue either.

Engineers like to optimize everything, including how they use their time. If you've got something in your head that you want to fix or write, you want to spend time doing just that, not staring at your screen waiting and maybe losing some of your mental model.

If you think a second or two matters when loading an editor you need to cut back on the coffee.

But you normally write code for an hour or many hours. Just opening one or two files for a quick fix sounds more like devops work.

That’s why I never close the project(s) I’m working on. So my startup time is instantaneous

YMMV I suppose, but I’ve never noticed the startup times, and I frequently create/close windows (I often have 2-3 at a time).

I just started visual studio code on my workstation, and it took 9 seconds to display a window, followed by 2 more seconds before populating it with an empty document. Sublime was sub second startup

I've always had sub second startup times. With text rendered within the first 1.5-2 at most. Time to "Actual interactivity" usually takes around 3-5 seconds, but that's mostly due to my plugins. I could start typing per-se, just not in Vim mode.

I mostly leave the editor permanently open on the project I'm working on, so I guess I don't really notice it much either way. And using the integrated terminal to change one dir back and switch to another project, then opening it with code . is a pretty good flow so I don't feel stifled in that sense either.

> I mostly leave the editor permanently open on the project I'm working on

I leave Visual Studio permanently open, but I use sublime for quick edits/viewing/changes (e.g. opening a remote file on perforce, or modifying a config file), so even 2 seconds to interactivity is just too long.

My low-end MacBook opens it in less than 2 seconds.

Seems it checks for updates every once in a while. Took 6 seconds the first time with network activity. Second time it was <2 seconds.

I've just tried it on a gaming PC (i7, installed on an NVM SSD.) 4 second startup compared to instant for Sublime.

Even still 2 seconds is too long for quick edits.

I'll give you that, startup time could be better. I don't really consider that much of a problem, but I can see how people would disagree.

Sure, Sublime is practically instant whereas VSCode takes... maybe slightly more than half a second on my machine.

It’s noticeable but is it really that much of an issue?

It's more noticeable on some peoples machines/setups, and some people are more sensitive to this type of performance.

Opening big files, opening lots of files, doing search and replace in open files, and my favourite, use thousands of parallel cursors to thousands of simultaneous edits in a single file, they are all noticeable slower in VSCode.

Damn, I love me them multiple cursors.

Never done thousands (wtf are you doing??) but I’ve done dozens and it’s been instant in VSCode.

Define large too - several mb? Or several 100?

Maybe you’re just an outlier?

I just opened a new window with 9 file tabs, and it opened in 3 seconds. I'm using a 2012 quad i5 desktop with non SSD drives. I suspect with SSD, it will be 1-2 seconds.

Never tried Sublime (it sounds fantastic), but VSCode is lightning fast compared to the other IDEs I currently use or have used in the past: Eclipse, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and MonoDevelop.

IntelliJ is probably the most annoying...it takes less time than VS does, but during the 2 minutes it takes to start it hijacks the OS window focus at least 5 times. I like to actually work on other things while waiting for that beast to start up and it constantly screws everything up.

Startup time and crashes seem to be a problem on mine. I compiled my own vscode though so that might have something to do with it.

Still use it exclusively as my C++ IDE with the help of clangd. Would love a native easy to use editor with good support for LSP and vscode's debug protocol. Bonus points if it works in the command line.

> I'm too much of a skeptic to believe it's just so developers have a warm fuzzy feeling associated with Microsoft...

Given that the development is very-very cheap for Microsoft, even this single thing could make worthwhile for MS to continue the project. VS code appears on HN regularly, it connects to a demographic that's very different from MS's core dev audience.

> guess it requires a degree of sensitivity that I'm not bothered with - sort of like people who claim they can't hear mp3 because they can only enjoy CD quality audio (not saying it's not true for them, just that luckily I enjoy both the same).

Maybe its better on other platforms, but on linux there's 30ms keyboard input latency in vscode, compared to the avg of 6ms I get in sublime.

The perceived difference in responsiveness is significant.

See https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ if you're curious.

I just checked on my win7 box. it's about 80ms. Typing in this reply is about 54ms. Notepad was 67ms. All that is like +/- 8ms.

lucky for me it's all unnoticeable.

My impression is that VSCode is partly about promoting TypeScript, and for what it's worth it has more or less worked on me. Create a "x.ts" and type some stuff; you will see error messages immediately that are roughly as good a first experience with an IDE as I've ever had. I mostly work in Python and Swift, mostly in VSCode, and I wish the support for those languages was nearly so good.

I am an intermediate JS programmer, fiddled with TypeScript a couple of years ago and was unconvinced. Since then TS has matured a lot, and I have been exposed to it in passing from looking at VSCode extensions. If I were to begin a web project today, I would give TypeScript a try. If it weren't for VSCode my thinking would probably be quite different.

As an open source project, VSCode is a significant example of TypeScript on Electron. As a self-hosted IDE I imagine that it has been a good source of feedback for the TypeScript team. I would be very interested to know how many TS issues (checker / compiler bugs, feature requests, etc) have emanated from VSCode.

> I imagine that it has been a good source of feedback for the TypeScript team. I would be very interested to know how many TS issues (checker / compiler bugs, feature requests, etc) have emanated from VSCode

You can filter by the "VS Code tracked" label on the TypeScript issues which will give you a rough idea.

https://github.com/microsoft/typescript/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%9...

Take a look at their telemetry policy, they basically know what type of underpants you are using! Having statistics on what 30% of the worlds' developers are doing and their preferences can be great when making business decisions. It's a bit weird that VScode is intruding on VS market though, it will be interesting when VScode threatens VS - will MS step in and stop them from implementing certain features !?

Minor nitpick, but Chrome has never been Open Source. Sure, it's mostly Chromium, but the point still stands.

True. VSCode is more open source in this sense. Of course, that doesn't mean everyone is happy... https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/17996

MS biz is azure-based, so I think the worse can happen is to ship vscode with integrated azure tools...

Makes it really easy to use Azure services.