Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

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1,608 pointsTiredOfLife543 comments

Ever since Nadella took over at Microsoft, such news items are becoming more and more frequent. Ten years ago, my first reaction at such a headline would have been to check my calendar if it's April 1st.

Microsoft has come a long way from the company that everybody loved to hate. IMHO, they still have a long way ahead of them, but it's nice to see they seem to be serious about it.

With Ballmer at the helm, I had the impression he didn't really know how to handle the rise of mobile devices and cloud services. Nadella seems determined to really change Microsoft from the old Windows-and-Office monopoly to something new.

By design, Nadella is getting credit by design for 'overnight changes' many years in the making. Windows 10 reflects the strategic decisions embodied in Vista. Ballmer owned enough stock that along with Gates' backing Microsoft could produce a largely incompatible new version of the Windows OS and Wall Street could like it or lump it. Gates and Ballmer have been divesting Microsoft shares and the new company is beholden to the "What did you do this quarter?" analyst's mindset. Before he left, Ballmer set the course and ensured there was a tick tock product development cycle.

Ballmer wasn't an idiot. It's not as if he didn't see the changing landscape. He left the company in a position to shape the future.

Indeed, Nadella is an opensource guy that had the chance to grow during Ballmer. While Microsoft (during Ballmer) had a slow change (going more opensource) from the bottom-to-top, there has been a faster change now from top-to-bottom. I remember Scott Hanselman, Scott Guthrie and Phil Haack (now at Github) during Ballmer as opensource contributors.

Ballmer allowed opensource during his leadership, but employees would be more "targetted" when it's not the right direction and it hasn't has "intermediate"/"fast" results... It's a much slower progress.

I believe Nadella has a lot of thanks for the change that Microsoft made before he stepped up and "received" the fame. There was a short release afterwards of his stepup with a Office version for iOS and Android, you just don't do that within the month.

Some things he did within the first 12 months:

- Bought Nokia ( they already worked very together closely, this was probably been going on for years )

- Office for iOS and Android ( was created during Ballmer, but probably got approval during Nadella)

- Opensource .Net ( opensource started with Asp.Net MVC 2, which wasn't an all-in though, i think of it as a "test" internally)

- Cloudobile - connecting mobile with the cloud ;) ( this is definatly more Nadella's style, coming from Azure)

But it isn't all "that good", a lot of people have been layed off ( approx. 18.000 ). While Ballmer's approach is very "profitable" and "evil", i do believe that Nadella's approach is more in the line of "more penetration", "cheaper prices" ( free version of Office eg.), being more open... It does come at a cost ( i hope no one blames me for mentioning this ). I do suppose those 18.000 people where mostly freelancers, but i'm not sure.

Nadella did have a few softballs lined up for him, but they were likely no more than a few years old. Don't overestimate what can be done in two years, but don't underestimate what can be done in three. Let's not paint Ballmer as an Ozymandias, though, secretly architecting the salvation of the company for 10 years while on the face it looked like they were teetering toward annihilation.

You're right, he wasn't an idiot; he was a well-educated and successful executive that made strategic decisions informed by 80's and 90's business thought and practice. Half a decade earlier he'd have done wonders. But in emerging technology markets those decisions cost Microsoft its industry superpower status.

In tablets, mobile that cost Microsoft early market dominance and possibly locked the company out of future hopes at regaining their title.

In Web servers, numbers from Netcraft[1] last summer showed that since Windows Server 2008 essentially what had been a healthy uptick turned disastrous for Microsoft's share of active web properties (half way down the page), and over the last 15 years a steady decline in Microsoft's market share in traffic volume handled.

1: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2014/02/03/february-2014-w...

Your comment is spot on. People don't look under the covers to realize this kind of change simply cannot happen over night or "because there is a new captain."

More specifically, your "By design" start is common in these kinds of managed transitions: you want the new leader to come in with tail wind.

> Windows 10 reflects the strategic decisions embodied in Vista

Hope you mean "embodied in Windows 8". I still remember the day I replaced my Vista PC with one running Windows 7, and wondering why the OS was booting so fast. I doubt "Vista" was strategic in any way, more incompetent management, but would agree "Windows 8" had strategic considerations behind it.

Yes. People who are quick to criticize Ballmer and praise Nadella do not realize that even though Ballmer was mostly into cruise control he indeed let people like Nadella lead other important efforts. None of these products seem like "overnight changes".

I don't know if he is an idiot but it is under his watch that someone signed off on windows 8, thinking hum, customers are going to love that.

Ballmer wasn't an idiot.

Sorry, but yes, the person who said this ( http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-steve-ballmer-thou... ) was, in fact, an idiot.

He should have had his walking papers from the board of directors by that Friday.

I must agree with even though I don't want to. Microsoft seems to legitimately changing its behavior.

Personally, I still want more. An open source editor would have been nice. Many good text editors are open source Vim, Emacs, Atom, Notepad++ entering this area with less community seems like an unneeded difficulty.

This editor is built on Atom.

Ballmer was good at sales but horrible at running a company. He was perfect before the internet came to be and before the rise of mobile devices. Ballmer, is in fact, what sunk Microsoft for a better part of a decade or more.

Nadella is doing MS good. For one, he understands market dynamics better than Ballmer did and is willing to gamble. As a C# developer of 10 years, this is the first time Microsoft actually "spiced up" their product line. Offering up robust tooling like Visual Studio Community (which is just a free version of Professional) shows me Microsoft is committed to the platform. Now, with Visual Studio Code, it will make my work better since I'm 99% on a Mac these days. The next few months will be interesting. :)

> Open source is not available to commercial companies. The way the license is written, if you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source. If the government wants to put something in the public domain, it should. Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works.

- Ballmer, 2001

Yeah Ballmer was pretty bad, but to be fair Bill Gates also was very anti open-source ("Communism! Communism!"... http://old.seattletimes.com/html/microsoft/2002152694_paul13...). I like the direction of this "new Microsoft", but they still do some nasty stuff: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/20/win...

> Ballmer was good at sales but horrible at running a company

From Wikipedia:

Under Ballmer's tenure as CEO, Microsoft's annual revenue surged from $25 billion to $70 billion, while its net income increased 215 percent to $23 billion

May all companies suffer equally incompetent CEOs.

No doubt Microsoft under ballmer launched quite a few failed products, but they've maintained their monopolies and have made record profits in the process.

Posted from my Zune

Some HN'ers may not recall Microsoft's "sleeping giant awakes" moment with the Internet in the 90's. Speaking of tidal waves, hang on to your surfboards, it's going to be big and fast. http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/07/internet-tidal-wave.htm...

Tim Cook's too busy with Jonathan Ive and Angela Ahrendts, turning Apple into a luxury goods company, to even know what just hit him.

Slowly but surely the best developers are going to leave the Mac platform leaving only consulting body-shops and corporates on iOS. Developing for the Mac and iOS is miserable. It wasn't always that way, but it is now.

Developers* are sick of proprietary stacks, from the language (Swift), to the APIs (Cocoa/CoreX/iOS), to the conditions attached (iCloud SDK only available for Mac Apps sold through the Mac Store), to the penny-pinching (pay your $99 fee and 30% even though we're raising $billion in debt to buy-back shares and hand out dividends because we're too tight-fisted to repatriate overseas funds and pay taxes on it) to the still broken XCode which only runs on a Mac, which must run Yosemite which feels like a Fisher-Price toy rather than a workstation for developers.

*Well, ok, I'm sick of it, but I'm sure a few people reading this are feeling the same way.

It is now just a month shy of 20 years since that letter was written.

And what did Microsoft do? They bought a browser and gave it away for free, cutting off Netscape at the knees, til the company folded and become the Mozilla Foundation.

They poured billions and billions of dollars into online initiatives from the Microsoft Network to Bing, including buying dozens and dozens of companies.

None of those were big successes. None of those have been a "tidal wave" of innovation, or success, or money. At least that I can see. Internet Explorer became dominant, but mainly due to bundling and that has gone away. IIS was a popular web server for a long time and people have written web sites using microsoft technology, but .net which is just a renamed MFC, isn't really much more used outside the same types of shops that used it before 1995. Yes, the mono project brought it to linux and made C# a more viable language, but that wasn't Microsoft's doing.

Maybe I'm missing something. Xbox and Xbox online are huge money sinks that I don't know if MSFT is ever going to recover the money from. The stock has been flat during that period while google, amazon and apple have been going like gangbusters. (And given the level of monetary inflation over the past 15 years flat means down.) Yes, it did boom during the bubble but that was %100 windows and office from the boom in companies putting computers on everyone's desk. And yes, it's grown the past couple of years after being flat from 2001-2011. But that's not a result of the 1995 "initiative".

Microsoft, like Apple, unfortunately for both, doesn't quite get the internet. It doesn't get mobile (unlike Apple).

The new CEO might change this, I don't know.

But the "internet tidal wave" happened pretty much completely without microsoft.

For the record, I worked for the company near the time of this letter, lived in Seattle during most of the intervening years and have been watching Microsoft closely for about 25 years.

There wasn't a Google then and Apple was much weaker. But I'll hang on to my surfboard nevertheless.

The push to open source started under Ballmer and has been gaining momentum the past few years. You saw some of the very early open source work debut when Scott Guthrie open sourced ASP.NET MVC 2 in 2010.

He (Guthrie) blogged a few times about evangelizing open source in Microsoft, and given today's news, he gained quite a bit of traction over the years. It also helped that ASP.NET MVC is a pretty sold web framework too.

I was at Microsoft when Nadella took over Azure but I left before he became CEO.

While it's true that Microsoft was taking steps to open source products under Ballmer, it was despite him, not because of him. There was an incredible amount of red tape, dragging of heels and internal fear uncertainty and doubt. Even internal only projects to synchronize open source practices among divisions were an uphill battle. If anybody deserves credit for Microsoft's open source efforts at that time, it's Sam Ramji who should get the credit, not Ballmer.

From the outside, Microsoft under Nadella has all the stops removed. This all lines up with a quote that I heard from Nadella 3rd hand: "We [Microsoft] can either push the 'One Microsoft' vision, or we can make money."

Funny thing is most MS devs seem to think that asp.net is on its way out.

My take is that in the most central sense, what Nadella and Microsoft are doing with the code editor, .NET, their free IDE, etc. is following a standard, powerful, old script:

If have something popular, e.g., .NET, then make it open and promote it as a standard. Then come out with enhancements every few months.

Part of the script is what Ballmer once said in his uniquely understated way -- "Developers! Developers! Developers!"

Then initially many developers will adopt and use the standard because it's open and, thus, close to universal, at least pretty good, and free.

Then, later, as Microsoft makes improvements each few months, it will be next to impossible for anyone else to make a fork that is competitive so that Microsoft will, then, continue to own the standard. Or, if a developer wants some new feature X, then they will likely just wait for the next version of the standard and hope.

So, thusly owning the standard, Microsoft controls a major part of computing which can be very powerful for Microsoft and a farm where only Microsoft plows, seeds, and harvests.

E.g., nearly all the developers would be on .NET, etc., but Microsoft and only Microsoft knows where the .NET standard will be in version n + 1, n + 2, ... out several years into the future. Then the rest of Microsoft can start development now that exploits the standard, say, two years from now while everyone else has to wait two years even to start. Bingo. Presto. The parts of Microsoft that exploit the standard get a two year head start.

Or, maybe at one time a computer company, say, HAL, designed, manufactured, and sold hardware, operating system software, middle ware software, and applications software. Then they had hardware enhancements right along, say, each year or so.

Well, the hardware specification about had to be in the manual Principles of Operation and, thus, essentially open. So, some plug compatible manufacturer, say, GA, could get the manual and build a cheaper version of the hardware.

Well, the HAL software people knew what good, new functionality was coming to their hardware some years before GA or anyone else did and could have a head start of those years. One heck of an advantage.

Net, thusly owning an open standard can be very valuable.

> Net, thusly owning an open standard can be very valuable.

Microsoft would like that more developers are locked in to their dotNet languages. And they try to influence the development of the next Javascript version (ES6 & ES7) by showcasing C# syntax ideas in their TypeScript language which then influenced ES6 - which is heavily used in Sharepoint/Office-Server365, Visual Studio Code/Online, etc.

Don't get me wrong, Google, Adobe, Oracle, Mozilla, Opera, etc are trying to influence the Javascript/ES6&7 development - everyone with different business cases behind them. But Microsoft is well know for what the parent poster wrote, and several newer evil things like the locked EFI on new PCs (instead of the open BIOS) that make it hard to install anything but Windows are still there, more there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9459890 .

Is it not what Google is currently doing with Android?

MS realized that the closed source, only running on Win32 platform battle is lost. Their only chance to get a grip of the future if they open up and go for supporting multiple platforms like Java did.

I fully agree with you there.

"Microsoft has come a long way from the company that everybody loved to hate"

Although, during the last few years, MS seemed to be the company that everyone ignored. But there is still a lot of built up animus against MS, due to their past business practices.

Yes, I observe that they are taking good steps and that this is clearly a positive change, but I am too old, it has been too many years, and I can't imagine that I will ever really be able to trust them.

Perhaps a younger generation can get some value out of their products, though, which would be nice for all the people who work there.

Definitely. It's because, fundamentally, Ballmer was not a technology person. He simply didn't get it.

Indeed Ballmer would have been great at selling toilet paper or soda but he was just not the software visionary that Microsoft needed.

Nadela makes some good changes. Let's see if it will continue into abolishing MS historic crooked practices like vendor lock-in, standards hijacking and patents abuse. When Nadela will do that, I'll agree that MS has really seriously changed for the better.

Sorry to nick pick but the following download statement is "not optimal":

  When this tool crashes, we automatically collect crash 
  dumps so we can figure out what went wrong. If you don’t 
  want to send your crash dumps to Microsoft, don't install 
  this tool.

So no check box to deactivate this phone-home feature that used to be standard in Microsoft products like Visual Studio, Office and Windows. That's a regression. (Source - bottom grey text: https://code.visualstudio.com//#alt-downloads )

Edit: there is only a small "preview" symbol on the top left, beside that no text or screenshot mentions it: https://code.visualstudio.com/

Visual Code is a brand new tool, and we only use the telemetry to help improve product quality, and better understand how our tool and features are being used so we can know how to improve VSCode. By the time we exit Preview, we will provide a way to opt out of this reporting.

Visual Studio Online "Monaco" code editor from November 14, 2013 seems to be the predecessor: http://weblogs.asp.net/jongalloway/a-quick-look-at-the-new-v... (scroll half way down for many screenshots and videos)

"This is the Monaco editor component from Erich Gamma's group out of Zurich. It was originally written in JavaScript but gradually rewritten in TypeScript. When Anders speaks about teams within Microsoft building large TypeScript systems, this is one he is talking about" as one comment mentioned on a related article "It's also used in VisualStudio and IE11's new F12 tools.": http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ARichNewJavaScriptCodeEditorSp...

"Code uses a newer, faster version of the same industrial-strength HTML-based editor that has powered the “Monaco” cloud editor, Internet Explorer's F12 Tools, and other projects.": https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs

Digging into `Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/main.js` reveals the crash reporter.

``` // Handle crashes reporter.start({ productName: 'Ticino', companyName: 'Microsoft', submitUrl: 'https://ticinocrashreporter.azurewebsites.net/crash', autoSubmit: true }); ```

Sorry to nitpick but it's nitpick, not nick pick.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_louse#Nits

I'm hoping this is only while it's in development/beta?

I agree, there should be an option for that.

But for those who care about their privacy, IMO its approaching the problem from the wrong angle if you're trying to get some developer to change their code to respect your privacy. Its their code. They can do what they want.

We as users should have protections from them attempting to submit information we don't want leaked. To me the solution is better perimeter monitoring and filtering.

While not practical in many situations I would highly recommend filtering all outbound traffic using a new firewall that supports such features (Sophos UTM for one, PfSense for another). Its the only way to know for sure those requests don't get out even when there is a disable option.

Free tool comes with strings attached, so?

Those products were under development in Ballmer's time but it seems Satya took the credits.

You're suggesting that the same guy, who told his own kids "no you can't have an iPhone, iPod or iPad, you have to use a windows/zune/whatever device", and then after leaving Microsoft, bought a basketball team, and told them they could no longer use their existing Apple products, would have OK'd the release of a cross platform development tool...

Ballmer was CEO for over 14 years, during which very little of this happened. While some of this was obviously being worked on under him, I find it hard to buy the idea that Ballmer did all the work and Nadella just swooped in and took the credit.

They may have been under development during Ballmer's time, but it's hard to believe that they would've seen the light of day under Ballmer's leadership. And if Ballmer released any open sourced products, I get the feeling that there would be major strings attached. And it would have a switch and bait sort of feel to it. Kind of like Oracle with Java and other technologies from Sun.

The fact is, Nadella has made open source a lot more palatable from Microsoft.

Perhaps he was involved, if not leading many of the developments while Ballmer was running the show?

Fun thing that nobody seems to mention is that a lot of "Visual Studio Code" is actually based on opensource. It's a atom shell app using omnisharp as server... Here some relative links where it's based upon:

https://atom.io/

https://github.com/atom/electron

http://www.omnisharp.net/

I think it's funny that MS uses 3rd party opensource for building a editor that supports Visual Basic (and other languages of course).. According to me, Roslyn does the intellisense (it's opensource now) and CoreCLR is the RyuJIT-compiler (also recently opensourced).

I suppose the Asp.Net 5 framework is perfect for beginning with this ( grunt, bower, ...). Debugging currently works with Mono 4.0.1 and node, soon all of them will be supported because of CoreCLR (source: https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/593454392851845120 ). .Net has a lot of nice things to offer ( odata, f#, entity framework, typescript), i'd be happy to see them getting more traction :)

We were talking about this at work today. Most interestingly, it is significantly faster than regular Atom.

Yeah, well, Atom is based on https://github.com/atom/electron and so is Microsoft Visual Code ;) . I thought it was better then Brackets ( Adobe) also, but that's another discussion :p

I think it's been mentioned a bit. Also it's actually all over the docs: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs

Given Microsofts recent endeavors, I also have very little doubts that the editor will be open sourced once it's released. I think keeping something closed source in beta like this is a good way to force Devs to objectively evaluate the product, as opposed to having immediate presumptions purely based on it's technologies.

Cross platform developers tools by Microsoft! Great news! MS has some of the best developer tools out there. In my opinion, the only downside has been the dependency on the Windows platform. As a developer, I feel much more comfortable in a Unix environment.

This move was unthinkable a decade ago. I'm very glad to see MS moving in this direction. Just because of this announcement I want to start playing with TypeScript and C# again.

This move was very thinkable a decade ago. Even two decades. In fact, a good example from 1995:

From Wikipedia: The strategy and phrase "embrace, extend and extinguish", was first introduced in the United States v. Microsoft antitrust trial when the vice president of Intel, Steven McGeady, testified[8] that Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz used the phrase in a 1995 meeting with Intel to describe Microsoft's strategy toward Netscape, Java, and the Internet.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguis...

It seems Microsoft has influenced JavaScript/ES v6 with their TypeScript intermediate language lead by Anders Hejlsberg. Given the vast TypeScript code based that MS wrote for SharePoint 365, Visual Studio Online/Code, etc. it seems more than logical. But, read on:

  BRENDAN [Eich (JavaScript creator)]: Again, TypeScript is 
  smart because it’s embracing and extending. Let’s hope 
  Microsoft doesn’t try to extinguish. That’s the third E.

  JAMISON:  [Laughs]

  BRENDAN:  I don’t think they will. I think they actually 
  bought into JavaScript at some level. And I’ve talked to 
  people like Anders Hejlsberg about this.

But Brendan Eich answered to my thread by replying to a parent:

  ES6 and the Harmony agenda influenced TypeScript. Where 
  TS went its own way on things like open modules, MS has 
  promised to track the Ecma standard versions ASAP.
  In particular, TS classes were purely an extension to 
  ES6's design, while ES6 was not frozen. There was not 
  feedback the other way, at least not phrased in terms of 
  TS -- the MS folks on TC39 had to make more generalized 
  arguments for changing the draft ES6 spec.

Maybe after more people know about Visual Studio Code some others share the "German angst" about their common business tactics a bit too. I would prefer if they don't turn JavaScript into C# Trojan horse style. Hopefully things have changed since Satya Nadella took over.

You can read the full thread there, it's just 3 days old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9442011

Even when Microsoft 'Embraced and Extended' Java, it was only on the Windows platform. It was not cross-platform. The whole point of that methodology wasn't to make sure that everyone was using Microsoft-flavoured Java, but to make sure that everyone was using Microsoft-flavoured Java on the Microsoft Windows platform.

The quote:

  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
  And those who can are condemned to see others repeat it.

comes to mind when I see the enthusiasm in this thread. The top comment itself seems like a blind praise one would hear in a cult.

Wow. I seriously don't know what to think anymore. What is their end game? Which platform are they hoping to become / remain dominant in?

Don't get me wrong---I'm as happy as the next guy about this. VS is the only tolerable language-dedicated IDE, if they take 25% of their VS engineering mantra to this it will be better than almost anything else.

But where does it end? I am clearly so not in touch with my inner mba. I just cannot even think of how what they are planning in the long run, here.

What's going on? Have they lost their minds? Is there a secret master plan? How realistic could that be? Is this the red giant to their eventual white dwarf?

Just... what?!

This is touched upon a bit in this episode of .NET Rocks.

http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1131

What I took from it is that Microsoft used to make all their money from Windows and Office, but now the company is looking to transition towards being a service company rather than a product company. As a service-oriented company, restricting developers towards a single platform doesn't really help them, so ultimately it's in Microsoft's best interest to get .NET out there as much as possible so that people will want to choose their services.

I won't admit to "getting it", but what I gather is that Microsoft want .NET to be a valid choice for everyone.

Hey, glad you're listening to the show!

I think it's apparent that Microsoft has admitted the reality that the operating system just doesn't matter any more - and you're not going to make money there.

So it's all about services, and Azure is one of the sources of those services.

Getting it is easy. Even with very good support for .Net (C#, F# mostly) in Mono, actually developing, deploying and maintaining an application outside of Windows with VS is problematic by comparison. In the past I wrote a couple of web based applications in .Net that could readily deploy to Linux. Even then, deploying to Windows was so less cumbersome than getting mod-mono working we decided it was worth the cost of Windows Web Server (or whatever the 2003 version was called).

At this point, they want to do this with Azure services. Which is very easy to work against with very rich tools in .Net. They're extending this development ability to other platforms, so that hopefully people will choose to use .Net even if targeting other platforms in the hope that people will choose to deploy to Azure over other cloud providers in much the same way that I chose to deploy to windows a decade ago.

This doesn't even count migrations of existing applications, which may well be better off on Azure (in windows) with new systems under Linux. The past two years, I've spent supporting Windows applications where a next generation was moving to Linux (node/iojs). Right now I'm doing this against Azure.

Being pragmatic, I'm even using Azure Storage (queues, tables and blob) for migration data, which means I don't have to setup/configure/manage a bunch of servers to do these tasks. Setting up RabbitMQ isn't hard, but there's time involved. Setting up C* isn't hard either, but if the data is transitional (using azure tables to hold data exported from the old system, and queues to trigger import into the new), it doesn't make sense to configure my own server. After using these services, I may use them more deeply, I'm already using Azure Tables for my configuration settings even, so I don't have to maintain an etcd/consul cluster.

All of this said... while I am mindful of getting locked in, and do have a strategy for breaking out, and my core application data won't be in azure services... actually using them makes me consider using them more.

From my own experience, what they are doing is a legitimate strategy and far better than how they approached it early on, and may still be. I stopped attending .Net conferences/meetings about 4-5 years ago because they were turning into Azure sales presentations more than development presentations in general. This is also the same time node.js started to become a viable contender, and I started using it for web project client files (js merge/min, less etc).

Great. Because what we need are more service companies.

They're just planning to coast on Android patent royalties from now on.

My hypothesis is that winning over developers to use their platform will eventually result in more Azure users. I get the feeling Azure will be their one of their next cash cows, and this is one of the steps in enabling that.

Azure users and native app developers on the Windows Store.

With the free W10 upgrades for 7/8 users and a 30% cut of Windows Store sales, they stand to make some money. But they have to get developers back on their side first, otherwise the store stays dominated by garbage.

Azure should be. The price of running Azure VMs is about double Google Compute Engine VMs. And it's slower to work with, too.

Though I will say that Azure is all about getting you to use non-VM services, to generate lockin to their platform.

Interestingly, owning the market in developer tools and programming languages is how Microsoft got their start in the 70s/very early 80s. Not only is this strategy a reasonable one (at least to my uneducated outside opinion), it's starting to look exactly like the one they had before MS-DOS (and that eventually worked out OK for them, though it is still much less certain that Azure or something like it can play the role of DOS in this story).

Whatever it is, I'm not sure I've actually been excited about what Microsoft is doing since Windows 2000, and that's starting to change.

>Wow. I seriously don't know what to think anymore. What is their end game? Which platform are they hoping to become / remain dominant in?

The .Net plaform that's used by enteprises and devs also in the Unix/OS X world?

I actually tried it for about a half hour, and so far like it a lot... I don't know if/what plugins will become available. I do like that the side menu makes it much easier to show/hide the file directory view (which is indispensable imho). Also, the git integration seems very nice, I haven't tried it as I'm editing via a samba share to a nix machine and don't want to screw up the file permissions.

A couple nitpicks...

* There doesn't seem to be a way to set the file encoding... can I assume that files will always be saved in UTF8 w/o BOM? * There doesn't seem to be a way to set line endings... can I assume that files will always be saved with unix (lf) line endings? By extension, will this fix windows line endings, or mixed to LF line endings? * It would be really nice if there was an integrated command prompt, similar to cloud9's, that could be shown/hidden. Configurable to use a given shell (in windows, I'd prefer a git-bash prompt).

All in all, really nice work, and this may well replace sublimetext everywhere for me. I don't use any of the more advanced plugins with sublime, and I actually like the VSC editor's UI more. They seem to have burrowed the hotkeys from sublimetext.

You can set line endings on the bottom right on the blue toolbar right next to the language, where it should say LF or CRLF.

> VS is the only tolerable language-dedicated IDE

Jetbrains?

Unfortunately there isn't a Jetbrains IDE that works pretty well with big codebases...

Windows is becoming irrelevant, Microsoft Office is being supplanted by Google Docs being both free and 'good enough', and worst of all, Microsoft completely missed the boat on mobile.

The Microsoft of old would have died out eventually. What we are seeing is not something you see often - a behemoth of a company doing a 'pivot'.

What would you do remain relevant in the face of the majority of the internet services not going anywhere near Microsoft for material income?

You're completely lost in your Silicon Valley mindset. Most of the western world still shows up to work and uses Office on Windows. Even in tech, I've seen non-technical workers request PC's just so they can use "real" Office. Office for Mac doesn't cut it. And while it might be good enough for you, it's not for many people who rely on Word, Office, and PowerPoint for work. Oh, and Google Docs is hardly free in the office.

> Microsoft Office is being supplanted by Google Docs being both free and 'good enough'

I like Google Docs as much as the next guy or girl, but I find this hard to believe when we had to end a meeting several minutes into it when the Google Doc displayed an http-500-style error when trying to load a spreadsheet.

Linux owns everything else, but Microsoft still own the corporate - and home - desktop. Devs using Linux or Mac are not the majority of users.

Windows is far, far away from becoming irrelevant.

A behemoth doing a pivot, but a pivot to what? And how are they going to monitize it?

It ties into Azure services. As I understand it, you're not bound to Azure, but it's an easy path from VS Code.

I think they understand that the long run is not in platform dependency.

Actually it is... it's not too different from what it always was. In the past, it was about businesses running "Back Office" versions of servers in the office. Because NAS boxes are now a good enough option in small businesses, and many are moving their hosting into more prominent cloud services, they are positioning Azure to be the platform of choice for windows based services and applications. They've got Office365 to handle the mail server duties people lost moving away from back office. As a small business you no longer need to self-host anything (other than maybe a local NAS box).

I hate sounding like an advertisement for MS, but it really isn't THAT much of a pivot. More adapting to keep those parts of income that used to come from server licenses now as services. Not even mentioning Azure as a target, which is probably the best bet for keeping legacy apps running while transitioning/refactor/rewrite to new generations.

It's a good question, and the only answer I have is that when the old binary fortresses crumble you have to do something to stay relevant, and hope business opportunity will be found. I developed almost exclusively on Windows for almost twenty years, and then one day I looked at the cost of a universal MSDN sub and thought: this is getting nuts. So this is a great development, imo, because MS tools rock. I have been working in Ubuntu now for over three years, and in that time I haven't missed very much, but I have missed Visual Studio.

It's pretty simple, Visual Studio Code, the .NET Core runtime for Os X/Linux, ASP.NET 5 and TypeSript are only useful to do Web dev. With Azure they provide the best cloud to run those web app. So they don't lose any VS customer that do software dev, not lose much web dev VS customer on windows because the full VS will always be better and they provide tools for every web developer on other platforms in their area of expertise : development with code completion tools. It's a pretty smart strategy I think.

It could be as simple as them realizing "hey, that thing we've been doing for the last fifteen years hasn't really been working. So maybe we should try doing the opposite."

It seems like if MS just doubled down on Windows and Office they'd be in trouble if/when those stopped being so profitable and there are certainly reasons to think they're going to lose ground there (especially with consumer markets, but with business markets too).

This is decent strategy if the end game is eco-system around Microsoft technologies, not just windows but their whole offerings including Azure, IoT etc.

Microsoft is a software company , so i would guess their end game is not services or hardware but software. Anyone got any ideas how they plan to dominate the software world and make money out of it? They 've just gained a ton of new fans though, that's for sure.

Based on complete guess work - They seem to be moving up the chain by building and selling services on top of existing platforms. e.g. Azure on top of databases, Third party apps on outlook etc. Not sure what they intend to build on top of windows...

Yeah the real test will be, is this thing supported 5 years from now? There's a nice history of projects like Silverlight that get a lot of buzz and love early on but languish and are killed a few years later when management and priorities change.

Management in particular. It's unfortunate that new personnel always feel the need to push their own vision rather than the previous guy's, often just for the sake of it.

Simply the same as usual: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguis...

I'm curious about how the editor itself was built. Is it itself written with cross-platform .NET? And if so, what UI library?

Edit: Got my answer. Electron and TypeScript: https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/593454574297427968

The Visual Studio Code shell is built on GitHub's Electron Shell, but the editor is a new and improved version of our own Monaco editor, which we use on Azure Websites, Visual Studio Online, and a number of other web sites, and in the F12 Tools in Internet Explorer.

Electron is formerly known as Atom Shell, which powers GitHub's Atom editor.

http://electron.atom.io

It'll be interesting to see what the performance is like, since this has been a recurring problem with web-tech based applications (especially editors like Atom and Brackets).

Actually seems to work better than Atom or Brackets so far... I found both to be intolerable pretty quickly... this, I'll be continuing with for a couple days, I like the UI better than sublimetext so far.

that was my thought too, testing it on my MBP - like Brackets and Atom, it showed up in `Apps Using Significant Energy`

Can access without school or work account, I don't know how to get this.

It will evidently be available "later today": https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/593454156779687937

EDIT: Apparently at 11AM PDT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9459632 (aka in an hour-ish)

Get it from https://code.visualstudio.com/Download

How is the editing experience? Is it faster than Atom?

I prefer it to atom already on OSX.

* handles multiple files well. atom ends up being too many tabs with no quick way to get to them

* MRU file switching

* shows side by side default v user settings

* launches must faster (which is strange since it is based on electron)

* JS debbuger

Can't wait to try the CoreCLR.

I just tried a 100MB C++ file; it opened in 2 seconds, and navigated very fast. No syntax highlighting, however a 20MB C++ file did receive syntax highlighting in the background (took around 30 seconds to reach the bottom), with navigation still 100% fast and responsive.

Right now, this thing blows the Atom editor out of the water in terms of performance. For plugins and breadth of available functionality, Atom is miles ahead of course.

this thing blows the Atom editor out of the water in terms of performance

Idem for Sublime Text. Loading large files on Windows is a total disaster with ST. Which is a shame, it's a great editor on all fronts except loading of large (as in > couple of MB) files which is just something I happen to do quite a lot.

Seriously? A 100MB C++ file?

Isn't there any way to analyze and get some of these speedups back upstream?

This is very exciting. If the debugger is anywhere near the quality of what ships with Visual Studio, this will be a joy for developers to use.

The description says it's lightweight, but on my machine it uses over 200 MB of RAM with no files open, and appears to be a Chromium-based thing, much like Atom (as others pointed out, it's based on Electron). Meanwhile, Sublime Text is using less than 100 MB of RAM with dozens of files open, some of them quite big. Visual Studio tends to use less memory than this, too. If "the language services [Microsoft] built for Visual Studio Code [are going to] be available in other editors as well", then I will definitely pass on this one (and this, assuming I ever get interested in developing in .NET again).

On second thought, for now this looks nothing more than a marketing trick, very well pulled off.

Good point, I'll have to remember not to use it on any of my development workstations that have 512MB of memory.

On my machine with no files open it's at ~80-85MB RAM, VS2012 is at 500MB with nothing open. Not sure why 200MB is of any consequence unless you're in a third world country. 8GB of RAM is ~$50.

Code is only using 20MB on my Win8 box.

Virtual machines, yo.

Notepad uses very little memory; maybe you could use that instead.

Nah. Notepad doesn't even show line numbers. How hard would that have been to display the line and column?

Good god that is even worse than emacs (eighty megabytes and constantly swapping).

I don't develop on a machine with less than 8 gb RAM and you shouldn't either.

Light weight compared to VS proper, which on my mid-sized solution is sitting at 1.2GB, and 250MB with no files open.

what? you don't have a 16core/32GB RAM machine with a 4K monitor?

tldr; light weight Visual Studio for OSX/Windows/Linux with support for dozens of languages, intellisense (autocomplete), refactoring, debugging (yes, real debugging), git integration and it is free

So ... pretty much perfect?

Thanks. Everything I wanted to see its there :)

not all langs have autocomplete yet, but I hope it will be soon.

special request for Rust autocompletion, please!

"Support for" maybe, but it's mainly meant for Javascript/HTML.

If anyone needs it (since Microsoft didn't supply it) I made an installer for Visual Studio Code Linux.

The installer grabs the archive, puts things where they go, and makes sure you have the nice shiny icon that it ships with.

http://www.thepowerbase.com/2015/04/install-visual-studio-co...

Thank you. That worked really well.

Surprisingly, VS Code handles large files quite well.

Just tested it on my Mac opening an uncompressed ember.js (~1.5MB). The file loads instantly and syntax highlighting is done in less than 1 sec. Movement and editing are very responsive.

On the other hand, when I open ember.js on Atom, it takes more than 10 sec to load and syntax highlight, and moving & editing take .2 ~ .3 sec to complete.

I've been using it with an ember cli app on OS X for a couple weeks (had pre release access). It's pretty nice some kinks here and there specifically with my tmp folder being giant. But for being what it is now its pretty awesome.

Handles builds and debugging too although it'll take some setup depending on your project type.

They basically took the vs Monaco online browser editor which was already awesome and put it on atom shell/electron for everyone to be able to use natively. Definitely a smart move. Compared to paying $70 for sublime it's a really good deal.

Website seems offline, download links are below. Cached version shows links: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:nfE4FmK...

OS X: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/D/5/0D57186C-834B-4...

Windows: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/D/5/0D57186C-834B-4...

Linux: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/D/5/0D57186C-834B-4...

Sorry guys but there is an issue with our load balancer which is being worked on right now. In the meantime you can find us here: https://vscode-westeu.azurewebsites.net/

Page is back up. Sorry for the fuzz. Happy Coding!

Hmmm, from bundled dependancies point of view Visual Studio Code looks very much like Atom, but with out of date versions?

Bill of Materials for Atom version 0.194.0 for OS X [http://www.bomtotal.com/#85c7e5b85a0ea17e50676c621eaaceaa] has e.g. nodejs 0.10.35, openssl 1.0.1j AND 1.0.1k, zlib 1.2.5 AND 1.2.8 and libuv 0.10.30.

Whereas,

Bill of Materials for Code version 0.1.0 for OS X [http://www.bomtotal.com/#26be3e80807532937c65c575360bfb91] has e.g. nodejs 0.10.22, openssl 1.0.1e AND 1.0.1k, zlib 1.2.3 AND 1.2.8 and libuv 0.10.19.

So Visual Studio Code ships with openssl released in Feb 2013 while Atom ships with openssl released in Oct 2014. :)

Furthermore Visual Studio Code ships with nodejs released in Nov 2013 while Atom ships with nodejs released in Dec 2014.

From this perspective Visual Studio Code is a blast from the past, lets hope it is not dangerously out of date.

I was so excited for a moment.

+ Syntax coloring, bracket matching: C++, jade, PHP, Python, XML, Batch, F#, DockerFile, Coffee Script, Java, HandleBars, R, Objective-C, PowerShell, Luna, Visual Basic, Markdown

+ IntelliSense, linting, outline: JavaScript, JSON, HTML, CSS, LESS, SASS

+ Refactoring, find all references: C#, TypeScript

Keep in mind, this is only a preview, and they're working hard to get all those languages to IntelliSense/Refactoring level. And once their extensibility framework is finalized, you can add support for whatever language you want.

Add Clojure and Clojurescript to that list.

Seems like it has lots of potential.

The product/download site should be at http://code.visualstudio.com when it goes live later today (it's currently showing a login page).

Download works from here.

The download worked for me, but the zip archive was corrupted, so I didn't even get a chance to try it out on linux (ubuntu 12.04)

Works for me too .. but there's no top-level directory in the .zip file, make an empty directory before unzipping!

Just an update - that URL is live now. I just downloaded Code for Linux.

A real question, not for flaming but just for understand: is free as in beer or in freedom? I mean, is it also open-source?

When most companies say free they mean free of charge, if they want to say open source they say open source, because that’s the term the world understands. Basically only the FSF uses free to mean Free Software.

Open source doesn't imply free (or libre, if you prefer)

Visual Studio Code is already built on top of a number of open source projects we've created or are contributing to, including the Roslyn compiler and language tools, OmniSharp, Typescript, and GitHub Electron. We are still in an early stage and we're evolving our architecture - and we'll look at what we open source, and how we do it, as part of that.

is there any way to attach the debugger to an existing node process instead of launching one separately?

It's free as in beer only. Please do not use it if you care about software freedom, and urge Microsoft to respect you by releasing the source code under a free license.

Not sure why this comment is getting a down vote, this is a very important issue. I understand a lot of startups get money from Microsoft, and a lot more use their products, but that doesn't make this less of an issue.

This looks like it is based on OmniSharp which is open source https://github.com/omnisharp

Looks like it's just free as in beer for now. Who knows what will happen a few months/years from now when it doesn't have a huge userbase and Microsoft isn't interested in continuing to support it alone.

I don't think it would be shocking to see it open sourced. Microsoft has been making a lot of changes on this front: http://microsoft.github.io/.

Do have a read of the privacy policy, especially the extra clause for free programs: https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/dn948229

Will your customers mind if the following data is sent to Microsoft when you're working on-site?

Usage data. We collect information about how you interact with our products and services. This includes information about how you use the products and services, such as the features you use, the web pages you visit, and the search terms you enter. It includes information about the device you use with the services, including IP address, device identifiers, regional and language settings, and information about the network, operating system, browser or other software you use to connect to the services. And it also includes information about the performance of the product or service and any errors or problems you experience with them. In order to create a richer picture of your product usage, we will correlate usage data across other Microsoft services, like Visual Studio Online.

I believe it's for the Preview version only. Afterwards you can opt out.

What's most impressive to me is the number of open source projects used to build it. In my old org at Microsoft it would have taken months to get approval for that many projects. It took us THREE WEEKS to get approval to use Google Mock for C++.

When I left Microsoft about a year ago I had the thought that it would be a cool company to work for again in about 3 years. They really seem to be taking some steps in the right direction.

I'm getting a weird error:

    AADSTS50020: User account 'me@captnemo.in' from external identity provider 'live.com' is not supported for application 'caf83767-0da8-454f-ae8d-77f63deaf359'. The account needs to be added as an external user in the tenant. Please sign out and sign in again with an Azure Active Directory user account.

I'm guessing only proper microsoft accounts are allowed? (@outlook.com, @live.com etc). I understand it might not be live yet, but I don't get the "unavailable yet" error.

In the keynote, it was announced as available "later today". They probably haven't flipped the switch yet.

The download will be available by around 11AM PT today. Hold tight!

fyi, same error with @outlook.com account

cool then. Let the wait begin.

Who else experienced a secret guilt about thinking "oh good, I'm going to try this out, and I hope it works well"?

If it helps with Unity C# development on a Mac, I will be very happy. Please be better than MonoDevelop!

Note: I installed the latest version of Mono and now Intellisense is working with my Unity project!

I voted for this:

http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/293070-visual-studi...

>Unity Integration

>Visual Studio for Mac is a breath of fresh air for those of us who use Unity on a daily basis. Please oh please get it tightly integrated, similar to UnityVS for Windows.

>The day I can dump MonoDevelop and Xamarin for good would be better than my last 10 birthday presents combined - and they were pretty sweet!

With a brief attempt, it's surely not ready to replace sublime for me. No package support, doesn't even come close to replacing fuzzy file matching (and the current file opening doesn't work over osx fuse). Not to say I don't welcome the attempt to replace Sublime, it just can't compete yet.

It does appear to load large code bases a lot snappier than Atom, and at least they got panel resizing working unlike Atom (which is still a hilarious thing not to have in Atom).

Edit: Atom seems to actually support dragging to resize panels in a recent update. Late coming but definitely welcome.

what am i missing here? a look at their TOS:

"The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft. Microsoft may use this information to provide services and improve our products and services. For this pre-release version, users cannot opt out of data collection. Some features in the software may enable collection of data from users of applications you develop using the software."

I haven't looked through their code, but Atom (which used atom-shell, now electron) actually embeds google analytics in the editor. It uploads commands and file extensions.

Great. I'm a confirmed UNIX geek and I'll be the first to say MS has always excelled at developer tools, and I'd be happy to be able to use them on Linux. (BSD is probably a pipe dream, but this is a decent start.)

If Electron (formerly atom-shell) have a BSD build/target working, it wouldn't be too hard for MS to support it... if the open-source their work on this, it'll be easier.

Take a close look at the bottom of this page: http://electron.atom.io/

Visual Studio Code is based on Electron!

Coreclr has a FreeBSD ci-build, so I'm not sure we should write it off yet ;)

Satya Nadella is taking the right decisions for Microsoft. I don't think Steve Ballmer would've done this.

"Visual Studio Code" is deceptive marketing. It has nothing to do with Visual Studio. It's just another Javascript text editor built on top of Webkit.

You're missing the point. It is in many ways better than Visual Studio because it's lightweight editor with a lot of the good stuff like a debugger, intellisense, refactoring, code navigation, etc.

This caters to people who want good cross-platform tools without all of the Visual Studio bloat.

How is it "deceptive" exactly? It uses the same language service (roslyn and typescript etc.) with Visual Studio; it has VS signature features like "peek", "find references" etc. Maybe the debugger is not powerful enough now, but it is just a preview version anyways.

Tried it and found it very disappointing. Not sure why they decided to use the name "Visual Studio" for it.

It's just text editor (although has a integrated debugger) built with Electron, performance is abysmal.

I've installed and tried it.

I am sure I must be missing something. It is a text editor, feels sublime-y. But it doesn't seem to be even a smaller cousing to Visual Studio, so the name is confusing.

It seems to be geared towards JS/Html. If so, we already have plenty of tools for that.

This new direction that MS is going in is very interesting

Some of my friends remind me that they use emacs already and don't need this one by Microsoft. Others say they use Sublime Text instead.

I used Visual Studio in the late 1990's and got used to the GUI IDE. I did a lot of work in Classic Visual BASIC before the Dotnet era.

I see they are open sourcing the CoreCLR and now Visual Studio Core. I gave the Linux version a quick look over, extracted the zip file to a directory and ran the ./Core program. It loads quick enough, most likely because there isn't much there.

I have to remember that this is the Post-Microsoft era, and Microsoft has to reinvent itself in order to survive. Microsoft knows the Hacker and Startup community uses OSX and Linux, and many have migrated away from Windows. Microsoft knows they like open source projects, so Microsoft open sourced Visual Studio and CoreCLR to have them ported to Linux, *BSD Unix, and Mac OSX.

Why Microsoft never made a version of Visual Studio for Linux or OSX is beyond me. We got Mono for a while, but it was always behind the Windows version. There was DotGNU but I lost track of where they were at.

If anyone is wondering how Microsoft earns money from open source projects, they will always sell books on it and also certification for it. Like Xamarian they can always buy out the company that forks it and makes a better version of it that is cross platform.

Is it webtech based(built with html/css/js) or hardtech based(C++,QT whatever...) since they are talking about Monaco,it looks webtech based. nice.

Curious, if they just launched cross platform .net core, why didn't they just .net? Why typescript?

Since its webtech it will interesting to see the speed vs atom and sublime

At the bottom of the download page, "If you don't want to send your crash dumps to Microsoft, don't install this tool."

That is rude!

From other comments, it appears that this is because this is a preview, and once it goes into full release, there will be an option to opt out.

Oh yeah. They even have preview badge on the home page. I was just thinking they could have stated it little bit politely. Something sort of, if you are not comfortable sharing the logs then wait for 1.0. blah..

But who cares :-). Many are downloading and I have it too!

The performances are already better than Atom, it can open 30MB XML files and 3MB easily. The syntax coloration is async, the code completion also and doesn't stop the editor and very sleek. But I already knew it was atom fault, Ace Cloud9 and even Code Mirror could open big files.

They found my 2007 email to Steve: http://jonathanmarkwell.com/2013/08/23/me-and-steve-ballmer-... ;)

Man, add this to the list of pretty forward thinking moves by Microsoft recently.

- Visual Studio Community Edition - Outlook and Office free for iOS and Android - iOS and Android apps running in Windows 10 - Free Windows 10 upgrade

Not bad. Not bad.

Downloaded & running on OS X.

Super impressed with its performance: it opens up & scrolls smoothly through a ~40M text file just fine. Memory usage is quite high though, but that's expected with an Electron-based app.

The only thing I haven't liked so far is the "Go To File..." search isn't fuzzy. Other than that my very brief usage has been pretty good.

Does anyone know if it has vim emulation?

I will look into porting ViEmu to this, will probably do so unless it's a huge amount of work.

Same question. Soon as they got that, I'll make this my mostly-full-time IDE.

If it does I can't find where to enable it.

Wow, I just ran it, and it says "If you don't have an existing project, we suggest using Yeoman to scaffold out a new one." Craziness! And very cool. Congrats to the Yeoman team.

I'd just like to point out that this is simply a re-branded version of Atom.io, with additional plugins.

Actually, no it isn't. The runtime is based on Electron (formerly Atom Shell). But the code editor has been entirely built by MS and been used on their Azure console.

For some reason this reminds me of how it was impossible for Nintendo to publish a SEGA game. Growing up as a die-hard Nintendo fan the thought of Sonic The Hedgehog appearing next to Mario was insane. Now days, I have a Nintendo Wii with about 5 games that feature Sonic, and one that features Sonic and Mario. SEGA has pretty much been reduced to a mobile publisher with questionable product decisions. Nintendo is slowly going down that route, though the DS and their strong IP keeps them alive.

They have a long way to go, I'm baffled as to why this got 1020+ up-votes. They knew they've been losing the OS and development tools battles to Apple and open-source for 10 years now and now skinning an open-source editor is going to change that overnight? They first need to catch up and then surpass the competition. They have a monumental mountain to climb to just even be anything like what they once were.

can't wait to test this out. I have both a Mac and PC at work and I don't like always having to switch over to the PC just to work on .NET sites.

https://code.visualstudio.com/download

Microsoft 2.0. This is a promising sign that a full IDE for Mac is only around the corner and I am legitimately excited for that.

Holy shit.

I wonder if this will be open sourced in a way that would allow Visual Studio intellisense in Sublime Text. I want that for C++ so bad.

http://www.omnisharp.net/ is what powers the intellisense IIRC (it was mentioned in the keynote).

Intellisense on Linux for C++ will be awesome. Sublime Text 3 is sorely lacking this feature :|

I've got the power!? Wow, MS took my request so seriously!

This was my last comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9438293

> By installing Visual Studio Code, you agree to the terms and data collection described here

Just curious, but I can't seem to find the terms.

Not directly connected to VS Code launch, but rather to the New Microsoft phenomenon: It is high time the MS offer a FUSE-like userspace filesystem for Windows (possibly, by purchasing Eldos). Along with package management (which is now addressed in Windows 10), this is one of the biggest holes in Windows armor.

The title is misleading. It only works on Windows, OS X and Linux. It does not support any other OSes at all.

Sure, there's no BSD support. Which puts it at what, 95% of machines in the wild can run it? This is very much cross-platform. Unless you're into BeOS, then yeah, you're out of luck.

This is awesome. A tolerable IDE for linux. From microsoft, of all companies. Awesome.

Some time ago I had read a blog post I don't remember where which said that all this credit that Google and Apple are getting for innovating cellphones and tablets, Bill Gates had envisoned all in MS a long time ago, but Ballmer or their management after that didn't focus on them, I had seen a windows phone way way before I had seen a tablet or a phone by apple.

It is nice to see MS changing their strategy, earlier they were all closed up to the boot, now they are opening up, but the only thing about Visual studio is that their Intellisense is completely different than Eclipse's auto complete :D

Never thought I'd say this ... but I'm beginning to like Microsoft again ... (not entirely sure this tiger can change it's stripes - but), all I can say is "Welcome to the the FOSS side!

Wow, I just opened a Clojure project and the code is color hilited and things like auto-indentation work. I need to find the documentation on with programming languages are supported.

There's a lot more info on it in its documentation here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs Looks interesting, but I don't really see much that differentiates it from Atom, Sublime, Brackets, etc. Also the language support is kinda barebones--no syntax highlighting for Go or Rust? Only intellisense for Javascript and web stuff? Debugging only for Node.js?

Interestingly, Atom is already available on MS, OSX, and linux today. They need to make it competitive and updated with the current Atom to be popular. On the other hand, this gives Atom some good competition and impetus to improvement, and I already like Atom.

no syntax highlighting for Go or Rust?

surely you jest ;)

We have Go syntax highlighting today, but not Rust - but look for it in the next update!

Its there, just not advertised.

A quick look at the docs and it doesn't yet support extensibility/plugins, though they say in the FAQ that they are working out a plan for that. Right now there is an external task runner that exposes the file name of the current buffer and some other data.

I look forward to seeing what they do on the plugin front. And hopefully they will be able to upstream performance changes to Electron and Atom and hopefully more.

Competition in the editor + dev tools space is always good.

Dang, was hoping this would make plugins for VS easier. I have to write a plugin for every release of Visual Studio currently.

This is definitely a big and newsworthy announcement from MS Build. And one of the few times that linux was given any respect as a platform. I think it still remains to be seen as to how serious MS is about real cross-platform products and work, but it's a great step. If they make their cross platform products roughly equal, not like that mono crap, then I would consider that to be a real effort by MS.

In this case, I think they are re-using Electron as a wrapper for their editor combined with some of their existing efforts for a web based VS editor. In this case, I'd suspect they'll flush this out to be much closer to what VS offers as cross platform. I see a LOT of developers using macbooks, and fewer booting up windows to edit VS projects anymore.

This is to stay relevant and that effort won't change... of course they are a company and may not offer a lot of energy if there isn't uptake. My limited use of the new editor is actually a pretty positive so far. I'm going to give it a try for a week, already I like the UX more than sublimetext.

Go here ... https://code.visualstudio.com/

and click on the video. The guy is using a macbook air and there is a Microsoft logo in the background.

It almost feels as though the "Developers! Developers! Developers!" Ballmer mantra is back! [0]

Microsoft has realized that it can't afford to lose anymore developer mindshare and it's creating some really spectacular results. This is a Microsoft I can be excited about!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE

Neat. I am all for equivalent look&feel and work flow across different OS's. One thing that strikes me as strange, this looks very similar to Qt Creator[1].

[1] http://doc.qt.digia.com/qtcreator-2.4/creator-overview.html

As some members of the development team are reading here:

Text rendering on Win8.1 with 4k screen and 175% scaling is slightly blurry compared to normal Visual Studio. Is that known and are there any plans to improve on that? I remembered similar issues with Atom before :(

Otherwise it looks great for a first release! Looking forward to how it evolves.

Thanks! We'll look into that

Microsoft expects to make an increasing portion of their revenue from Azure PAAS. Visual Studio has a button to deploy to Azure. Amazon has nothing like an IDE and language/runtime to compare with this.

Even the Economist had an article last week about how the EU countries lament their lack of platform prowess.

a free cross-platform code editor by Microsoft, you say?

vi kids-get-off-my-lawn

They should just rename it "Code", visual studio inevitably brings memories of "bad M$". This is going to be a good trojan horse to lure developers into the microsoft platforms now with windows 10 and all, esp. as OSX developers are getting tired working with 80s technologies.

There are a billion things called "code" already. Calling it 'Visual Studio' highlights two fairly important things:

1. It is an IDE

2. It is owned by Microsoft

Does anyone know how to turn on automatic suggestions for non-supported languages? Syntax highlighting works great for Ruby (not officially supported), and good suggestions appear with "Ctrl-Space", but not automatically. Haven't had much luck with the settings JSON.

Pretty neat, though!

Anyone have a complete list of languages with "non-support"? I was a little underwhelmed with the official list, but Ruby was one of my wants there. What else does it highlight that's not on the official page?

Microsoft has been doing a lot of cool things lately. I hope their new strategy will pay off for them.

I wrote a small early review of Code here: http://jamie.sh/blog/9/an-early-review-of-visual-studio-code TLDR: I liked it a lot :)

Just wanted to point out it's not the "real" Visual Studio. But amazing nonetheless.

Thanks M$ :)

This is a good move if they're hoping to entice Eclipse users on *nix to migrate from the JVM ecosystem to CLR.

Deploying Windows programs on FreeBSD is one thing but if they want to grow their developer base, they need to target programmers who don't run VS on Windows.

That's what I thought when I read the headline, reading the comments it's clear it's just another programmer's text editor.

Eclipse is a full, powerful, customizable platform, mature with plugins for everything.

May be I am missing something, but I could not see anything about IntelliSense for Node. I tried exactly what they showed at the conference.

http://i.imgur.com/lMQvZa0.png

Did you add the typescript definition file for node and reference it?

Download the node.d.ts file from the DefinitelyTyped repo https://github.com/borisyankov/DefinitelyTyped then add that file to the folder containing your node app.

Then in the file you are using the http object reference the .d.ts file by adding the following to the top of the file:

/// <reference path="node.d.ts" />

After that you should get intellisense in the file.

Or you could just type __directory, wait for the squiggly to show up and press ctrl-. => there is a code action there that will download the node.d.ts and add a /// reference for you

I am waiting for the day where Visual Studio Express will be available for Mac and Linux!

Is there someone else thinking of installing Visual Studio and the full stack required to develop .NET but is a bit scared of filling their system with many GB of stuff that is probably not immediately necessary and installing services that will probably not be of use anytime soon, slowing their machine down and making it not as "versatile" anymore as they would like it to stay?

Of the times I installed VS in past, just to toy with it, I remember that after installing it I immediately had many ram eager services loading at startup and had a dozen items more in "installed applications" and whatnot which were all strictly interconnected making always hard to find - in case you wanted to remove the full thing - if you managed to do it fully.

..what version of VS would you suggest to install anyway?

Tell me about the R# support. That's the only thing making VS usable.

Resharper probably isn't going to run on here. Resharper has definitely been a requirement in the past, but Jetbrains seems to be slow to embrace Rosylen, which is clearly the future on .NET. It's not at all clear to be how long they're going to remain in their dominant position.

I wonder why they didn't allow to work on network folders. It looks like all files must be local, otherwise it can open the folder and list files in sidebar but can not open individual files.

The site and download are available now at https://code.visualstudio.com/

Been playing around with it and I like it.

It's good for web development, and that's a smart move by microsoft to product a lighter weight ide for this purpose.

Can't wait to try this. Been using atom for a year. Been hearing some great things about the new Visual Studio (compared to a few years ago).

I wonder which technology they are using to archive multi platform ? Are they going native Qt, Gtk and Cocoa or they use Mono and Window.Forms ?

it built on top of http://electron.atom.io/

They use webkit -.-

Microsoft ppls please release a windows phone emulator for OS X and Linux. You will make my year if I don't have to dual boot anymore :)

Did you try wine?

Sweet! I don't think I'll be able to use it until it supports React/ES6, but the debugging features look awesome!

The market needs a superb JavaScript IDE. So far, IntelliJ is the leading out there but there needs to be more competition :).

I can't wait to use this with typescript!

...for a moment I hoped Microsoft has made a usable C++ debugging tool for Linux.

I know, such dreams were too far-fetched.

Will the Microsoft and Github consortia be able to dethrone Jon Skinner and his Sublime Text?

It may be cool. It may even work. It's still a Microsoft product and for that reason alone I won't touch it. They've been shit-talking Linux/UNIX for 20+ years and screwing us over in uncountable ways for even longer. They may be changing, but I, for one, will never trust them due to their history.

Very cool editor but be warned the download archive is a zipbomb (no root directory).

That's not what a zip bomb is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_bomb

It had a root for me: VSCode-osx

Wow. This is really really good. blows sublime away for node / html / js

I just downloaded and looked inside the package. It's based on Atom.

Would this allow for cross platform C# development with a GUI?

Would be nice if you fixed your login so you could get to the download. Still the same old Microsoft. Seriously can't you just have a simple link to download? Tsk tsk, should've hired me for that I'd position

Thank you for fixing it!!! I'm really starting to like you guys again!!!!

pressing F12 in the editor brings up editor debug gui, apparently it is a webpage.

So that thing potentially runs as a website in the browser as well, cloud editing.

Wow, it can be downloaded now!

jsx files are not highlighted

Way to go!

Good bye Sublime and Webstorm!

That's it, MS is the new Google, Google is the new Apple, Apple is new Microsoft.

I literally just bought clion a couple days ago.

(not regretting it either, I can't stand visual studio, and am not likely to switch without very good reason)

omg so exciting

can't wait to try it out!

Uninstalling Sublime Text 3...

I'm not sure if you saw, but you can keep it and do the same things as well in the future.

"Microsoft says the language services it built for Visual Studio Code will be available in other editors as well, including Sublime Text, Vi and Atom."

I'm a pretty heavy user of IntelliJ but would never ever uninstall or not use Sublime Text, its like comparing apples to oranges. Any decent developer would know when to use either to be more productive.

Haha I had a similar first thought. I hope its as extensible as some of the competition, I'm sure it won't come ready out of the box for some things I find fun.

This was posted 10 minutes ago and you commented 5 minutes ago. Given I tried to download it and it failed with some weird error message on their site (not to mention registration walls suck) the logical conclusion is that you are not serious about your comment. That then begs the question why you would post such a comment. Looking at your submission history, one could easily assume you work for Microsoft.

If that is the case, I would suggest you guys grow a brain and remove the registration wall. It's 2015.

Lots of "Microsoft" on the front page of HN.

Today is the first day of the Build conference, which is Microsoft's main developer conference. Their new dev toys were announced today.

http://www.buildwindows.com/

That's usual phenomenon, lol.

Microsoft is a shameless company. They used to attack Linux, GNU and GPL. Now, suddenly they want to be friends with Linux. Why? It has everything to do with money. Today windows is getting less relevant day by day. So, microsoft is trying to put their into Linux and Mac.

Shameless? They are a listed company. Listed companies have one goal: to make money. They will do whatever they think will make them the most money in the end.

I have always seen the inverse: Stallman and followers treating anything done by Microsoft as an abomination.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

This is the embrace stage, guys. Don't fall for it.

I know HN hates memes but...if ever a thread needed an itshappening.gif, this is it.

Tried -- failed. Login through MS, then get screen that it's unavailable.

Come on, MS.

"(if this link isn’t live yet, give it a few more minutes and then try again)."

It's literally right after the link. What did you expect? It's a breaking story, the product was just announced and in the conference it was announced as available later today.

More than a year ago I skipped the page that asked me to enable the two-factor authentication, as I didn't want to give Microsoft my phone number. One day I found myself completely locked out of my account. Long story short, I've never been able to access my email account again, since that day. The instructions to unblock the account [1], say, I shit you not:

>"To unblock your account go to https://account.live.com and sign in to your blocked account."

If I try to enter my number, I get an unspecified error and I'm still locked out. Obviously. But not to worry, the page says:

>"If you can’t unblock your account with the security code and changing your password, customer support can still help you get your account back. To contact customer support, you’ll need to sign in to your account, and fill out an online form."

...

I really don't know what kind of brain-dead monkeys they put in charge of these things. And while it's hard to believe that a functioning human being could ever come up with such a bullet-proof procedure to unblock an account blocked for "security reasons", what really baffles me is that this has been going on for almost two years. This should give you an idea of how much Microsoft cares about their consumer products.

So, consider yourself lucky to have gone past the login, which, apparently, isn't something to take for granted with Microsoft.

[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/outlook/account-t...

It is a bit strange that Microsoft keeps wanting me to log in for things like this. I'm not sure.

If any Microsoft engineers happen to be scanning this thread, it correctly redirected me to our organizations login page for me to use my standard credentials, but failed after with a generic Bad Request error.

It may not actually have gone live yet. In the keynote it was announced as "releasing later today".

The page might only be live after the keynote.

An area that Micro$oft seems to ignoring is their device as in Barcode scanners that are still stuck on .Net 3.5 and VS 2008. Its matter of time before Andriod steals this and drives more developers to Java/Google.

Yeah, if only I could use lamdas in my barcode scanner... Perhaps what you're ignoring is that MS doesn't see much growth for themselves in the embedded market and, therefore, doesn't see a reason to invest there.

If Mac version is written with Cocoa API then I love Microsoft. If it's not - it's useless.

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