Microsoft Delivers Visual Studio Code 1.0

Announced in pre-release form alongside Visual Studio 2015 last summer,Visual Studio Code—a lightweight, cross-platform code editor—is now available in 1.0 form, Microsoft says.

“Since our initial launch one year ago, 2 million developers have installed VS Code,” the Visual Studio Code team revealed. “Today, we’re excited to report that more than 500,000 developers actively use VS Code each month.”

Visual Studio Code is freelyPerformance, stability, accessibility, and compatibility available for Windows 7, 8, and 10, Mac OS X Yosemite and El Capitan, and, astonishingly, Linux (in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, no less). It provides many core editing features from the full versions of Visual Studio—like IntelliSense, Debugging, Peek, and Code Navigation—with a more streamlined user interface. It also supports a wide variety of programming languages—including JavaScript/TypeScript, C++, C#, HTML/CSS, and many others—and can be improved with over 1000 extensions. It’s also fully localizable, and ships in 9 different languages, including French, German, Japanese, and Chinese.

To arrive at this 1.0 release—the most recent update was previously a March Insiders Release–Microsoft says it has worked with the community to improve performance and stability and fix hundreds of bugs.

In its own post, Microsoft also explains the genesis of this project, which began a few years ago when the “Monaco” team set out to build a browser-based code editor that worked like a native app. It’s based on the editor that ships with the F12 developer tools in IE and was used to create a Microsoft Node.js-based service that’s now used by Microsoft Azure.

“We wanted to build a native development tool that developers could install and use anywhere, for any code,” the team explains.”And, from our experience, we believed that it was important to not just have an editor, but one that could help developers accomplish their most common tasks: navigating code, debugging, and working with Git. And so, Visual Studio Code was born.”

Looking ahead, Microsoft says that Visual Studio Code will receive further improvements to performance, stability, accessibility, and compatibility, and that it will continue to invest in improvements based on user feedback.

You can download Visual Studio Code from the Microsoft web site.