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Comment by Hydraulix989 | Hacker News Reader

Huh, why does this still exist if there's VS Code?

Visual Studio supports some legacy technologies that VSCode likely won't ever support well.

Even ASP.NET Core which was specifically designed to allow development exclusively from the terminal, still offers a better experience in the full VS Than VSCode (even if JavaScript/CSS/TS/etc part is arguably better in VSCode, the C#/.Net side is better in VS).

But long term: I anticipate VS being a life-support product for that legacy tech and VSCode being the only IDE they move forward with. We just aren't quite there yet.

I tried out VSCode after all the rage and was pretty underwhelmed. It looked like a lightweight syntax highlighter plus a JS extension marketplace.

I remember VS was a real well integrated IDE back when I used it. Something in the same league as IntelliJ, etc. VSCode wasn't in the same league at least for me.

Same here. I'm one of those people that try VSCode every few weeks because "it's free and it would be nice to have a more lightweight IDE for some stuff". But coming from IntelliJ it is really hard. It feels like a lot of convenience and stuff "that just works" is somehow there, but not working on the same level the "old" full fledged IDEs. You can notice the optimizations that gone into the auto complete features and similar. Tried Python, Go, Java and Kotlin in VSCode. Just couldn't compare. Granted. At least Java and Kotlin might not be languages that work well in non specialized IDEs.

I really loved the remote execution feature of VSCode. But in the end it resulted in me programming in IntelliJ and then copy and pasting the code over to VSCode...

For me it feels like the modern Eclipse. The one IDE/Editor which is basically a container for thousands of plugins. And it's great. Everyone uses it. There are a lot of plugins that cover every imaginable use case. Even more than e.g. IntelliJ or Visual Studio could cover (ok maybe not). But in the end it's just not as great as an IDE with most core features already build in and tuned against each other.

But then there are also people using unmodified vim installations for programming. So the expectations and ways of working really seem to differ a lot.

I love VS Code but it's no replacement for Visual Studio when developing .NET apps.

Other than legacy technology like WYSIWYG form builders, Visual Studio Code has the same functionality but with a simpler, superior interface. Visual Studio is a legacy product, it’s that simple, although a lot of people don’t seem to want to accept it.

No it’s not. VS Code doesn’t allow you to view/manage threads, modules for example which are crucial for a bit more advanced debugging. I love VS Code and use it daily, but it’s no replacement for VS yet.

Designers is just one of a handful of things. The perf analysis tools for example don’t exist in vscode. You can compensate by using a separate profiler but that just drives home the point that VScode replaces only some parts of VS.

For me VS has more reliable IntelliSense.

Literally the only reason I'll jump into it for C# projects now and then... Spend most of my time in VS Code for what I work on more, but will still open VS now and then when a C# solution is just a bit too much. It's gotten a lot better though.

Visual Code has a simpler interface because it has a fraction of the functionality.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

"80% of the people use 20% of the features... Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%."

> legacy technology like WYSIWYG form builders

Kind of a weird statement to make -- who doesn't use WYSIWYG when working in XAML? Nothing legacy about that.

I only used VS in recent years for unity development

You can't compare - VS is way ahead of VSC in terms of code completion and IDE<->engine integration

More powerful debugging, more mature UI development tools, does a bit more for you.

Because it's more stable, has better debugger, testing, etc. In Visual Studio Code I feel like things might break if just update it, or the plugin/extension got updated. Also you can keep the whole team in the same "boat" with single IDE, and your IT would know how to respond.

Why does the hammer still exist if there's pliers?

It does a ton more than VS Code, especially for large Windows applications and C++ stuff.

Maybe someday we will have only a base simple VS Code and be able to extend it to do anything we want with plugins, and transform it into a full Visual Studio if we want. But not yet. As of now I only use VS Code for Typescript dev with React and Node and stuff. And good old VS for .NET dev.

Same reason other IDEs exist. VS Code is just the tip of the iceberg.

There is no comparison between the two. VS is the _real IDE_ while VSCode is a text editor like Sublime Text

While I agree, VS does a LOT more than VS Code does... VS Code is also a lot more than Sublime Text.

I would also say that VS Code's plugins don't block the world. Web projects in VS are absolutely painful in general.

VS Code is a glorified text editor (which isn't bad, I use it). Visual Studio is a full-fledged IDE.

VS Code has things like refactoring support and integrated debugging which are traditionally seen as the dividing line between an IDE and a text editor. How are you defining that distinction?

If I write a C++ program in VS Code how do I build, debug, or profile it?

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod... claims to support it. I haven't used it in C++ but if it follows the pattern of Rust, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, or Java once you have the appropriate language extension installed the built-in debugger will work transparently.

Nope.

Nope as in you haven’t tried it, the instructions at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/cpp/cpp-debug are wrong, etc.?

I have tried it.

The page says you need to install a compiler. The debugging page says GDB. It doesn't ship with these does it? That's all I'm saying.

Ah, so from my perspective that's not a question of whether it's an IDE or not but whether it bundles third-party code or lets you install it using the standard package manager for your platform. In the Unix world the latter is typically considered a feature, especially for a polyglot editor which supports a number of languages and tools which are all developed by different groups on schedules which are not coordinated.

I'm with you on this one... While the VS Installer has checkbox options for X or Y... a lot is in the box regardless of what you're actually using/targeting.

A lot of the tooling options with VS are getting better month over month even. There's a reason why a fair number of developers for Go, Rust, TypeScript and other languages are absolutely preferring VS Code over other options...

If you use the Remote Containers feature, then it effectively does ship with those. You run the command to set up a C++ dev environment for your project, and it downloads a Docker image from Microsoft's registry that has those tools installed in it, and lets you work and run your code inside that image.

(You do still have to separately install Docker. I guess this is because Docker puts a lot of global state on the machine, so having VSCode try to manage a separate copy of it would cause too many problems.)

Need to play with the Remote Containers feature a bit more... I use WSL remote the vast majority of the time myself, and the SSH remote has been invaluable for a couple of more finicky server setups for my own one-off projects.

The terminal used with VS Code (and Hyper) needs a bit of work though... it gets wonky now and then, good enough most of the time, until it isn't.

Yep.

I use it often. It doesn't do profiling but building and debugging works fine (though I still prefer VS proper).

I use VS on Windows, VS Code on Mac for the same code base. I have for decades in the former and years in the latter (finally ditching XCode might have been one of the best decisions I've ever made with regard to my tooling).

A compiler vs a basic IDE, yeah, totally the same.

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