For decades, when I went to work in the morning, I would open Microsoft Visual Studio (or one of its predecessors, such as Visual C++ or Visual InterDev), have a cup of tea, and maybe participate a morning meeting. . a rough start. I leave the IDE open all day to avoid launch delays while I go through the development/testing/debugging cycle. Also, when I’m working on a C++ project with about 2 million lines of code, I speed up the project by testing the code daily and automatically running a batch script to restore product in the first few hours. first.
By the way, Visual Studio’s startup efforts have dwindled over the years. This is not a problem even with large Visual Studio 2022 projects.
Also, Visual Studio Code usually launches quickly, and I can stay productive within minutes, even with large projects. I often say, but not always: Visual Studio Code itself needs to be updated every month, and most of the extensions I install usually need to be updated. However, updating dozens of extensions in Visual Studio Code takes significantly less time than rebuilding the symbol table of a large C++ project using Visual Studio that was previously used.
However, choosing between Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio is not as easy as choosing between a basic editor and a heavy-duty IDE. Although Visual Studio Code is configurable, Visual Studio is very comprehensive. Your choice may depend on your working style and the language support and features you need. Let’s take a look at the features and trade-offs of these two developer tools.
What is Visual Studio Code?
Visual Studio Code is a lightweight yet powerful desktop source code editor for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It provides support for JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js, and supports many other languages (such as C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP, and Go) and runtimes (such as .NET and Unity). ).
In addition to the easy-to-start philosophy, VS Code includes IntelliSense full code for imported variables, methods, and modules. Graphics fix; Powerful editing features such as linting, multi-pointer editing and parameter suggestions; good code orientation and refactoring; and Git support, including integrated source code management. Most of them are inherited from Visual Studio technology.
Real VS Code is built using Electron shell, Node.js, TypeScript and language server protocols and is updated monthly. Extensions are updated as needed. The level of support varies by programming language and extension, from simple syntax highlighting and bracket matching to debugging and refactoring. If a language server is unavailable, you can add basic support for your favorite language using TextMate Color.
The code in the VS Code repository is open source under the MIT license. The VS Code product itself is licensed by Microsoft as a standard product because it contains customizations specific to Microsoft. Free, but with a commercial license.
What is Visual Studio?
Visual Studio (now Visual Studio 2022, 64-bit) is Microsoft’s primary IDE for Windows and macOS. Using Visual Studio, you can develop, analyze, debug, test, collaborate, and deploy software.
On Windows, Visual Studio 2022 has 17 workloads, which are sequential installations of tools and components for different development purposes. The workload represents an important improvement to the Visual Studio installation process, as the full download and installation of Visual Studio 2022 can take several hours and fill up hard drives, especially SSDs.
Visual Studio 2022 for Mac has a simpler installer than the Windows version because it does not support many targets. It enables web, mobile and desktop development using .NET and includes support for Unity, Azure, and Docker by default. .NET Core, Android, iOS and macOS targets are optional; the last three use Xamarin.
IDGVisual Studio Installer for Mac. Note that Visual Studio for Windows only has four targets to choose from instead of 17 workloads.
Visual Studio 2022 has three SKUs: Community (free, unsupported for enterprise use), Professional ($1,199 first year / $799 upgrade) and Enterprise ($5,999 first year / $2,569 upgrade). The Enterprise edition has architectural features, debugging, and testing capabilities that the other two SKUs lack.
Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code?
One might think that deciding between Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code for a particular software development task is as easy as deciding between an IDE and an editor. This is not the case as VS Code can be configured very close to the IDE for many programming languages. However, this configuration comes with some trade-offs.
For example, if your development style is test-based, Visual Studio will support it right away. On the other hand, VS Code has over 15 test-driven development (TDD) extensions that support Node.js, Go, .NET, and PHP. Also, Visual Studio works well with databases, especially Microsoft SQL Server and the like, but VS Code has a database extension. Visual Studio has good refactoring support, but Visual Studio Code implements basic refactoring operations for six languages.
There are some obvious cases where one IDE is better than another. For example, if you are a software architect and have access to Visual Studio Enterprise, you may want to use it for architecture diagrams. If you need to collaborate with team members during development or debugging, then Visual Studio is a good choice. If you need serious code analysis, profiling, or debugging of snapshots, Visual Studio Enterprise can help.
VS Code is very popular in the data science community. However, Visual Studio has a ton of data science features it offers.
Visual Studio doesn’t run on Linux; VS Code does not. Visual Studio for Windows, on the other hand, has Linux/C++ downloads and Azure support.
For the daily development, testing, and debugging cycles of the programming languages supported by Visual Studio and VS Code, which tool to choose is a personal choice. If you work long hours on development projects, Visual Studio may be a better fit. If you want to develop in a short time and switch between other tasks, then you can choose Visual Studio Code.