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Comment by runesoerensen | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic, but I wish MSFT would come up with a better codename. The need for quotation marks around "15" in every single post I've seen about this new version of Visual Studio should be an indicator of why that is necessary ;)

As far as I can tell these are the current VS products with version numbers and codenames:

* Visual Studio Code

* Visual Studio Team Services (formerly know as Visual Studio Online)

* Visual Studio 2015 / version 14.0 / codename Dev14

* Visual Studio "15" Preview N / version 15.0 / codename Dev15/vNext?

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Visual Studio Code has nothing to do with Visual Studio proper other than the name, the logo and the fact that both are Microsoft projects. It's a pretty good text editor, actually - it's my Go IDE, thanks to the vscode-go plugin.

I just wish they hadn't named it like that, as it's a pain to open it (and Visual Studio) on Microsoft's own OS: if I want to open either of them, I'll begin to type "visual" after pressing Start, press enter... and with a bit of luck, it will be the "Visual Studio" I wanted to open. Worse is when I'm on it, and the guess doesn't change until I begin to type "Code" after typing the first two words. Really frustrating. So Microsoft's problem with names goes beyond codenames...

Can't you just type "Code"? I'm not on a Windows 10 machine at the moment so I can't confirm it there, but it works on Windows 7 and I doubt Microsoft would go backwards in that regard.

Indeed, that works, thank you :) I had previously tried "vscode" and other variations, but it appears the executable name is the super-generic Code.exe. There's still the problem of VS Code opening when I wanted VS, but for this case I'll try to use "devenv" instead.

Small trick for the search issue: Add a start menu shortcut with the name "vscode" to make it show up when you search for "vs"

VS "15" is just the 15th version of visual studio (well 14 since they skipped 13). Internally there are a lot of folders named xx14 for Visual Studio 2015 (which was VS "14" until it got the name Visual Studio 2015) and the version number of the version I'm running is 14.0.23108.0 which starts with 14.

I agree it's pretty confusing because we're in the 2000s and the version number and the year are similar, but it's consistent and makes some amount of sense.

I'm counting 11 versions on Wikipedia[0], but that may be wrong and I'm not sure as I've only worked with VS since Visual Studio 2008 (aka version 9.0, released in 2007) :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visual_Studio#Histor...

You have to go to the Visual C++ page to see the rest, as Visual Studio was borne out of Visual C++ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_C%2B%2B

Visual Studio releases generally aren't named until closer to launch.

Visual Studio "15" will most likely end up being called Visual Studio 2017 when it launches, but, until the marketing drones do their thing closer to launch, it doesn't have an official name. Hence the "15" in scare quotes.

(You saw the same thing for 2015/"14" and 2012/"11"; 2013 had a short enough cycle that it had its name throughout its preview cycle.)

You're right, I guess I'd just prefer if they consistently used the version number in VS product names (the IDE/Windows-only edition).. It's a boring nitpick though and for that I'm sorry - but I actually think this might hurt their pre-release marketing efforts since people unaware of VS internal version numbers probably don't realize that "Visual Studio '15'" is different from "Visual Studio 2015".

Visual Studio Code is not really related to the core VS project. It's branded this way I think to improve consumer confidence but it's not related. It's weird to include this in the same list as the others.

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