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Comment by Toritori12 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what is the most "valuable" IDE right now for MS. A few years ago VsCode was marketed essentially as "Visual studio for beginners", where you were supposed to move to Visual Studio after you became a real dev, but since then VSCode has been growing and growing and stands now as the most used "IDE", where Visual Studio is mostly seen as "legacy" (oversimplification, great IDE for CPP and .NET but still...).

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Easily VSCode, if we're talking about developer reach. I'm not big into Microsoft stuff, but almost every 'serious' .Net developer I personally know is using Rider, so I can only assume that Visual Studio is retreating to the same space occupied by Eclipse and Netbeans, i.e. still used, but mostly only in places where change is hard.

I'm an emacs user and even I keep a copy of VSCode installed just because I occasionally have to interact with SQL Server and it's really the best way to do that on non-windows systems now that they're winding down ADS.

I only use Rider because it's cross-platform. It's not inherently better (or worse) than Visual Studio with Resharper installed.

it's fasterb and has a functional vim interface

Most .Net devs I know use VS, I used Rider because it’s so much less awful.

I work at a mostly .NET firm and almost all the developers on that side of things are on Visual Studio. Rider has less penetration than PyCharm has among the Python devs.

Monetarily, Visual Studio.

There are tons of enterprise development workflows, and plugins, that probably will never be ported into VSCode, from their .NET and COM implementations.

Now in terms of mindshare, and gateway drug into Microsoft ecosystem, definitely VSCode.

It is also the best Web IDE, for the return of timesharing development, sorry cloud.

That alone means everyone that is on Github and Azure, gets to use it as the modern version from X Windows and RDP/Citrix sessions.

Not bad, for Eclipse v2 (Enrich Gamma is one of the main architects), pity the whole Electron shell though.

How is VSCode a "gateway drug" into the MS ecosystem? It's good PR, for sure, but it has little to no conceptual/GUI overlap with, say, Windows.

FWIW I use it via Linux .deb and integrate with a private GitLab.

Azure and GitHub are large Microsoft revenue sources. Both have first-class VSC integration.

Worrying about Windows is fighting the last war.

Azure, Github, CoPilot, .NET (why do you think it is cross-platform), Java (yes, MS is back in Java land, they were the ones with initial ARM support), Go (they have their own FIPS compliant distro), Python (although with layoffs maybe not anymore), Rust, npm, Powershell, Powerapps, 365 AddIns, Teams plugins, clang/cmake (part of Visual Studio installer), Azure Linux, Sphere OS,....

Because it opens the gate up to the rest of Microsoft tools.

Once you're gonna play with azure, GitHub, vsc, you're bit by bit invested in the ecosystem and opening the wallet for that other feature or integration.

Erich Gamma

Thanks for the correction.

It is also the best Web IDE, for the return of timesharing development, sorry cloud.

Also the best webdev IDE.

VS Code is a downgrade from open source to freeware. At least the C++ plugin is freeware. And they block access to the extension store from any fork (self-compiling VS code is also considered a fork). So if you are an OSS purist, VS is bad. Other than that it's effing great.

> where you were supposed to move to Visual Studio after you became a real dev

It was never marketed like that, for the simple reason that popular VSCode languages like Python/HTML/Javascript were never well supported by regular Visual Studio, so there is no way to move to "proper" Visual Studio if you do Python/web development.

VS could do web okay 5 years ago, haven't run it since.

It still does when Web == .NET Web, and way better than VSCode at it.

Visual Studio is still widely used in the games industry, being pretty much a requirement for targeting some platforms.

It is becoming common for some to use Rider primarily, but VS is still used as part of the build system.

it has to be VS Code by a long shot. They don't charge for it, but it serves as an enormous draw to keep people in the MS ecosphere and keeps MS in the developer game.

That's ironic since I develop most of my Microsoft related tech with JetBrains products and only use vs code for frontend/node - non Microsoft stuff.

> A few years ago VsCode was marketed essentially as "Visual studio for beginners", where you were supposed to move to Visual Studio after you became a real dev,

When was that?

Yeah I’ve been using it since it was released and can’t ever remember it being marketed as such.

Yeah I only really saw vscode as a "let's capture atom and sublime users, bevause they will not use Visual Studio anyway" approach.

I wont likely find the video but I remember watching the PM for both VSCode and VS (at the time was the same one, not sure now) recommending people to move to Visual Studio "eventually". I clearly remember it because it didn't make any sense, even if the names were similar there were/are nothing alike UI-wise and supported-language-wise. I said few years ago but it was prob around 8 years ago, vsc was still pretty young.

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