Small Bytes: Visual Studio Code (Premium)

As happens with most popular Microsoft brands, Visual Studio is used as the name for several different products, some of which have little to do with each other. There's the flagship Visual Studio integrated developer environment (IDE), which came to life in the 1990s as Developer Studio and runs only on Windows. There's Visual Studio for Mac, which started as Xamarin Studio and focuses largely on mobile app and game development. And then there is Visual Studio Code, a free, open-source, cross-platform, lightweight, and extensible code editor that has taken the developer world by storm since its initial release in 2015.

In the developer world, there are full-fledged IDEs and then there are editors. IDEs tend to be powerful, but big and unwieldy, and to many, they represent the old way of doing things, with projects, wizards, and designers. Editors, by comparison, are minimalist and lightweight, a new way of doing things, and they tend to work well with folder-based workflows, like web development.

Coming up in the world when I did, I saw software development through an IDE-colored lens. From the wonder of early MS-DOS-based IDEs like Borland's Turbo Pascal to today's Visual Studio, IDEs just made sense to me, and still do. They hid the complexities of the underlying compilers and added integrated debugging, IntelliSense, and other useful features.

But code editors have their advantages. And as the world has shifted to mobile, web, and cloud development, and to GitHub-hosted code repositories, this type of product has become quite popular. Where IDEs seem big and heavy and require a lot of configuration before they're useful, code editors are light and fast and are immediately usable. Like IDEs, good code editors are extensible, so they can be tailored for different languages, frameworks, and workflows. They also tend to be very keyboard-centric, with lots of keyboard shortcuts instead of graphics interfaces: developers, like writers, like to keep their hands on the keyboard.

But I write that now with the benefit of hindsight. I never saw the value of standalone code editors and I certainly didn't understand what Microsoft was trying to achieve with Visual Studio Code.

And while I am still in no way a Visual Studio Code expert today, I do understand the point of this product much more now than I did a decade ago. And I do use it every day, for writing, which speaks to the versatility of Code and the strength of its extensibility model, and, of course, for coding. To date, that's been mostly web-based coding in JavaScript or TypeScript, but also Flutter, which can be used to create mobile, desktop, and web apps.

Of course, Visual Studio Code is in many ways more than just a code editor. It features the IntelliSense feature from "big" Visual Studio, and even some of its project management capabilities. It supports multiple languages out of the box and can be extended to support virtually any language and many developer frame...