10 ms·

Not to be confused with Visual Studio Code, the text editor, which will remain supported.

by gberger 3y ago

rco8786 3y ago
> the text editor This is...not a super accurate way to describe VSCode
- averageRoyalty 3y ago
  Isn't it? I use it daily and that's precisely how I'd describe it.
- krylon 3y ago
  It's technically correct (which as everyone knows is the best kind of correct), it just, uh, omits a few details for the sake of brevity.
- outside1234 3y ago
  This was how the Visual Studio crowd inside of Microsoft described it until VSCode basically destroyed their business. :)
  - phillipcarter 3y ago
    I wouldn't use the word destroyed - Visual Studio (Windows) has been a billion-dollar ARR business for a long time, and likely still is. The trajectory is certainly not in favor of it, but there's an utterly massive number of enterprise .NET and C++ devs on Windows who will be using it for a long time.
    - umeshunni 3y ago
      The crazy thing is that - I worked on VS 10 years before you did - and it was at a (near) billion $ ARR back then. So, it looks like it has been a flat business for a long time.
      - phillipcarter 3y ago
        Oh, undoubtedly. When I was there the writing was on the wall -- it's got a decade or two more life to it, but it's long peaked on the ARR curve.
      - uxp8u61q 3y ago
        That's what happens to mature products. Not everything is a brand new startup that grows 1000% every quarter.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        It's more that Microsoft lost the cross platform war. .NET lost and electron won. They even use it (or their own WebView knockoff) for their own products now. So there's no more need to give .NET away. They just milk the niche market that still depends on it.
        thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        >> the niche market that still depends on it. That "niche market" likely pulls in billions of dollars from enterprises.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        It does yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really. Which means there is no longer any point in giving it away for free to try and gain more mainstream application marketshare. They tried to displace Java but failed.
        thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        >> yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really. C# is currently #5 on Tiobe right behind Java: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ It is just as mainstream as Java and everything else in the top ten. >> They tried to displace Java but failed. Enterprises used to be either Linux / Java shops or Windows / C# / VB shops. Now both Java and C# are being slowly displaced by Containers, Go, and Rust.
    - benbristow 3y ago
      Indeed. To use the new C# devkit in Visual Studio Code you need a Visual Studio/MSDN subscription too. JetBrains Rider's a bigger competitor but even then (at least at my org.) most devs have a Visual Studio Professional/Enterprise subscription as a backup.
      - notpushkin 3y ago
        There are alternatives though. I've heard somebody hooked up Samsung's open source C# debugger, for example.
  - atonse 3y ago
    I don't know how good VS Code is now (with regards to all the features VS had) mainly cuz I don't code in .NET, but I still miss the powerful tools from VS that I had nearly 20 years ago (for C#), in Ruby, Elixir, etc (and some other languages). The amazing debugging, stepping through, etc that Eclipse and Visual Studio has, were leaps and bounds more superior to all the stuff that was lacking in the simple text editors. LSP has helped tremendously. And there are similar debugging protocols. It's kind of getting there, but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around. And I feel the lack of such good tooling has enabled a whole generation of "print string" debugging (which I totally do now) because we simply can't easily run and step through. Is this other people's experience? Hopefully the debug world is better in Go/Rust land than it is in Elixir/Ruby land.
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      > but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around It's working in VS Code now, too. For popular languages, you just have to install the respective plugin (only TypeScript is builtin), but it's just a click on the prompt. I've been doing lots of Python debugging and it's pretty much a seamless experience.
      - atonse 3y ago
        Excellent. I remember C# support for .NET Core was really solid even 6-7 years ago. So for a large number of use cases, they have to be talking about retiring VS eventually too. This multi-process architecture (with language servers, debug servers, remote SSH mode, etc probably making much better use of multiple cores has to be easier to migrate to)
        notpushkin 3y ago
        Yeah. Remote mode is a killer feature IMO (sadly the official implementation is closed source, and there's no support for Docker in unofficial ones – although coincidentally I'm working on this)
- swatcoder 3y ago
  It’s in the same feature family as emacs, Sublime, Notepad++, etc — all of which are called text editors. They all have extension architectures that expand on what that means, but they all cover the same kind of use cases and they all stop short of traditional Integrated Development Environments. Unless you’re saying that none of the others should be called text editors either (a daunting uphill fight against history), it’s an exactly accurate description.
  - jupp0r 3y ago
    They cover all use cases of traditional IDEs, but you need to edit files instead of clicking through endless menu hierarchies. They also don't tell you what your compiler or build system should be.
  - hateful 3y ago
    VSCode is far superior to the actual Visual Studio in so many ways. It's definitely closer to Visual Studio than it is to Notepad++. On personal note: my company pays for Visual Studio Ultimate + Jetbrains for me and I rarely open it these days and use VSCode 99% of the time.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - globular-toast 3y ago
      Yeah, it's superior to Visual Studio because it's more like Emacs, a text editor. Emacs users saw the benefits of a single text editor a long, long time ago. Back when I started programming it was common for people to use a different IDE per language. There was VS, Eclipse, Dreamweaver etc. I thought that was insane. It's been funny seeing people finally realise the same a decade later.
      - no_wizard 3y ago
        counterpoint: JetBrains IDEs are the sweetspot between absolute single purpose IDEs (like Eclipse) and text editors that require plugins to be useful (broadly speaking). I am all in on JetBrains, to be perfectly transparent, but I have yet to see anything come close to the seamless experience I've had with their IDEs
- belfthrow 3y ago
  From the crappy bolt on things required to make it anywhere close to a decent IDE, it is essentially vim with tons of incompatible plugins that continually conflict one and other.
  - fshr 3y ago
    Can you provide an example of a crappy bolt on or a set of incompatible plugins? I’ve not had that experience and I’ve used it for six or seven languages.
    - wiseowise 3y ago
      Calva and vim plugin. Anything that adds custom shortcuts.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  It is a text editor. People treat it as an IDE, because it can be made that way with plugins, but fundamentally it is a text editor.
  - a_wild_dandan 3y ago
    A fresh VS Code install has all the usual IDE tools I need for my job (editing, debugging, symbol parsing, etc). Is it still not an IDE? Suppose it was missing something for someone else's workflow. What if we bundled all the extensions needed for most developers into the install? Is it an IDE then? We just need less modularity/more bloat at install? Distinguishing VS Code from IDEs seems so forced and unintuitive to me. What's the point?
    - jacurtis 3y ago
      I've always described VSCode as a text editor with IDE capabilities. I would personally call it a text editor and not an IDE though. If you do a fresh install of VSCode you may notice that almost everything is a plugin. Even basic language support for popular languages like python are technically plugins. Everything you add from there are as well. A true vanilla install of VSCode is truly a text editor. However it was designed really well in that it has a lot of good integrations which make plugins feel almost integrated and natural. Not to mention the plugin process is the smoothest i've seen of any text editor so for many people it is transparent, they just think they are enabling features and don't realize they are actually just downloading 3,000 plugins. I'm not trying to argue a no-true-scottsman here. If people want to call it an IDE they can. But download something from JetBrains and give that a go or something like xCode or the real Visual Studio and you'll see how deeply "integrated" it is, so that it feels like a full featured developer environment from the start, hence the IDE moniker. There's nothing wrong with VSCode. You can do your whole job in it i'm sure. But compare it to something like JetBrains and it is really really hard to put them truly next to eachother. With enough customization you can get VSCode close, but it sure isn't like that without a lot of customization and plugins from 100 different developers with varying levels of support and reliability. Fwiw, the Wikipedia page for Visual Studio calls it an IDE and the wikipedia page for VSCode calls it a "source code editor". So maybe as a "source code editor", thats where it bridges the gap between IDE and Text Editor.
- irrational 3y ago
  It is not integrated, so it is not an IDE. Text editor seems like the best description for it.
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    It does have an integrated debugger, build systems, code intelligence, refactoring tools, and version control. What other things need to be integrated before it can be blessed as an IDE?
    - tomjen3 3y ago
      Does it or are they available as a plugin?
      - IshKebab 3y ago
        Yes. These features are directly supported by VSCode. They aren't added via plugins. Support for specific languages/debuggers/build systems is provided by extensions. Look up how LSP and DAP work for example. A hugely successful extensible IDE system.
    - hateful 3y ago
      This is what I'm saying! At the risk of ad hominum - I feel like a lot of the comments classifying VSCode as merely a text editor haven't really used it for development - at least not directly or in a long time. Though this whole thread could really be considered off-topic since the original post is about Visual Studio for Mac!
jug 3y ago
With Microsoft backtracking on their Visual Studio non-Code designer interface and no longer offering it for modern Windows apps (WinUI 3)… Honestly… Is this a long term plan to just sunset Visual Studio? It always felt like it to me. From the get go. But they deny it. Still, Visual Studio is so heavy, feels sluggish, written in WPF, and not from an era of modern, plugin-based software development. Visual Studio Code also offers many features VS don’t. Oh, and it perfectly debugged Python code on Windows for me (VS somehow failed to attach its debugger to Python.exe) and auto-detected venv’s for me from the mere folder structure, none of which Visual Studio did. Code feels like the .NET Core of Microsoft editors to me. Not only new thing for cross-platform development, but the next thing for Windows development too. Just like .NET Core. Sure, Code still miss things but those only feel like extensions away at best. A far better and less monolithic design. Now, if we could only have it be WebView2 based rather than Electron on Windows and cut 50% RAM use right off the bat…
- delfinom 3y ago
  Dunno man, to me VSCode feels sluggish. It takes a significant amount of clicks debugging C++. I can't just have the file and debug views present at the same time, I have to keep jumping back and forth. The launch json config system also introduced a ridiculous amount of verbosity, not to mention it's insanely easy to multi launch instances and confuse yourself.
- alexvoda 3y ago
  The WPF version of VS has supported many plugins from the start (2010). The previous version (2003-2008) also supported plugins but not sure how extensively. Before that VS was just the name for a suite of different tools (Visual C++, Visual Basic, Visual InterDev and a few others).
  - jug 3y ago
    Absolutely but it just feels like VS Code has taken the extension based model even more to its heart. I think the difference was striking when I first started using it. What would be bundled with VS is often just an extension in Code. It’s wholly language agnostic in that regard. Even JavaScript, Python or their own C# requires an extension for anything but the lightest support such as syntax. It’s based around linters and language servers, often outsourced to third parties to relieve Microsoft of the burden besides their own technologies. It just comes across as the more sensible way to build an editor or IDE without overwhelming your own team and making it more maintainable in the long run. And ultimately that this will even show up in the quality of the product they market itself.

Not to be confused with Visual Studio Code, the text editor, which will remain supported.

rco8786 3y ago

> the text editor This is...not a super accurate way to describe VSCode

averageRoyalty 3y ago
Isn't it? I use it daily and that's precisely how I'd describe it.
krylon 3y ago
It's technically correct (which as everyone knows is the best kind of correct), it just, uh, omits a few details for the sake of brevity.
outside1234 3y ago
This was how the Visual Studio crowd inside of Microsoft described it until VSCode basically destroyed their business. :)
- phillipcarter 3y ago
  I wouldn't use the word destroyed - Visual Studio (Windows) has been a billion-dollar ARR business for a long time, and likely still is. The trajectory is certainly not in favor of it, but there's an utterly massive number of enterprise .NET and C++ devs on Windows who will be using it for a long time.
  - umeshunni 3y ago
    The crazy thing is that - I worked on VS 10 years before you did - and it was at a (near) billion $ ARR back then. So, it looks like it has been a flat business for a long time.
    - phillipcarter 3y ago
      Oh, undoubtedly. When I was there the writing was on the wall -- it's got a decade or two more life to it, but it's long peaked on the ARR curve.
    - uxp8u61q 3y ago
      That's what happens to mature products. Not everything is a brand new startup that grows 1000% every quarter.
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        It's more that Microsoft lost the cross platform war. .NET lost and electron won. They even use it (or their own WebView knockoff) for their own products now. So there's no more need to give .NET away. They just milk the niche market that still depends on it.
        thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        >> the niche market that still depends on it. That "niche market" likely pulls in billions of dollars from enterprises.
        wkat4242 3y ago
        It does yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really. Which means there is no longer any point in giving it away for free to try and gain more mainstream application marketshare. They tried to displace Java but failed.
        thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
        >> yes but it's no longer a mainstream dev tool really. C# is currently #5 on Tiobe right behind Java: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ It is just as mainstream as Java and everything else in the top ten. >> They tried to displace Java but failed. Enterprises used to be either Linux / Java shops or Windows / C# / VB shops. Now both Java and C# are being slowly displaced by Containers, Go, and Rust.
  - benbristow 3y ago
    Indeed. To use the new C# devkit in Visual Studio Code you need a Visual Studio/MSDN subscription too. JetBrains Rider's a bigger competitor but even then (at least at my org.) most devs have a Visual Studio Professional/Enterprise subscription as a backup.
    - notpushkin 3y ago
      There are alternatives though. I've heard somebody hooked up Samsung's open source C# debugger, for example.
- atonse 3y ago
  I don't know how good VS Code is now (with regards to all the features VS had) mainly cuz I don't code in .NET, but I still miss the powerful tools from VS that I had nearly 20 years ago (for C#), in Ruby, Elixir, etc (and some other languages). The amazing debugging, stepping through, etc that Eclipse and Visual Studio has, were leaps and bounds more superior to all the stuff that was lacking in the simple text editors. LSP has helped tremendously. And there are similar debugging protocols. It's kind of getting there, but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around. And I feel the lack of such good tooling has enabled a whole generation of "print string" debugging (which I totally do now) because we simply can't easily run and step through. Is this other people's experience? Hopefully the debug world is better in Go/Rust land than it is in Elixir/Ruby land.
  - notpushkin 3y ago
    > but again, nearly 20 years ago, I could start up a project and hit the debugger immediately without fiddling around with settings and googling around It's working in VS Code now, too. For popular languages, you just have to install the respective plugin (only TypeScript is builtin), but it's just a click on the prompt. I've been doing lots of Python debugging and it's pretty much a seamless experience.
    - atonse 3y ago
      Excellent. I remember C# support for .NET Core was really solid even 6-7 years ago. So for a large number of use cases, they have to be talking about retiring VS eventually too. This multi-process architecture (with language servers, debug servers, remote SSH mode, etc probably making much better use of multiple cores has to be easier to migrate to)
      - notpushkin 3y ago
        Yeah. Remote mode is a killer feature IMO (sadly the official implementation is closed source, and there's no support for Docker in unofficial ones – although coincidentally I'm working on this)
swatcoder 3y ago
It’s in the same feature family as emacs, Sublime, Notepad++, etc — all of which are called text editors. They all have extension architectures that expand on what that means, but they all cover the same kind of use cases and they all stop short of traditional Integrated Development Environments. Unless you’re saying that none of the others should be called text editors either (a daunting uphill fight against history), it’s an exactly accurate description.
- jupp0r 3y ago
  They cover all use cases of traditional IDEs, but you need to edit files instead of clicking through endless menu hierarchies. They also don't tell you what your compiler or build system should be.
- hateful 3y ago
  VSCode is far superior to the actual Visual Studio in so many ways. It's definitely closer to Visual Studio than it is to Notepad++. On personal note: my company pays for Visual Studio Ultimate + Jetbrains for me and I rarely open it these days and use VSCode 99% of the time.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    Yeah, it's superior to Visual Studio because it's more like Emacs, a text editor. Emacs users saw the benefits of a single text editor a long, long time ago. Back when I started programming it was common for people to use a different IDE per language. There was VS, Eclipse, Dreamweaver etc. I thought that was insane. It's been funny seeing people finally realise the same a decade later.
    - no_wizard 3y ago
      counterpoint: JetBrains IDEs are the sweetspot between absolute single purpose IDEs (like Eclipse) and text editors that require plugins to be useful (broadly speaking). I am all in on JetBrains, to be perfectly transparent, but I have yet to see anything come close to the seamless experience I've had with their IDEs
belfthrow 3y ago
From the crappy bolt on things required to make it anywhere close to a decent IDE, it is essentially vim with tons of incompatible plugins that continually conflict one and other.
- fshr 3y ago
  Can you provide an example of a crappy bolt on or a set of incompatible plugins? I’ve not had that experience and I’ve used it for six or seven languages.
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    Calva and vim plugin. Anything that adds custom shortcuts.
LoganDark 3y ago
It is a text editor. People treat it as an IDE, because it can be made that way with plugins, but fundamentally it is a text editor.
- a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  A fresh VS Code install has all the usual IDE tools I need for my job (editing, debugging, symbol parsing, etc). Is it still not an IDE? Suppose it was missing something for someone else's workflow. What if we bundled all the extensions needed for most developers into the install? Is it an IDE then? We just need less modularity/more bloat at install? Distinguishing VS Code from IDEs seems so forced and unintuitive to me. What's the point?
  - jacurtis 3y ago
    I've always described VSCode as a text editor with IDE capabilities. I would personally call it a text editor and not an IDE though. If you do a fresh install of VSCode you may notice that almost everything is a plugin. Even basic language support for popular languages like python are technically plugins. Everything you add from there are as well. A true vanilla install of VSCode is truly a text editor. However it was designed really well in that it has a lot of good integrations which make plugins feel almost integrated and natural. Not to mention the plugin process is the smoothest i've seen of any text editor so for many people it is transparent, they just think they are enabling features and don't realize they are actually just downloading 3,000 plugins. I'm not trying to argue a no-true-scottsman here. If people want to call it an IDE they can. But download something from JetBrains and give that a go or something like xCode or the real Visual Studio and you'll see how deeply "integrated" it is, so that it feels like a full featured developer environment from the start, hence the IDE moniker. There's nothing wrong with VSCode. You can do your whole job in it i'm sure. But compare it to something like JetBrains and it is really really hard to put them truly next to eachother. With enough customization you can get VSCode close, but it sure isn't like that without a lot of customization and plugins from 100 different developers with varying levels of support and reliability. Fwiw, the Wikipedia page for Visual Studio calls it an IDE and the wikipedia page for VSCode calls it a "source code editor". So maybe as a "source code editor", thats where it bridges the gap between IDE and Text Editor.
irrational 3y ago
It is not integrated, so it is not an IDE. Text editor seems like the best description for it.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  It does have an integrated debugger, build systems, code intelligence, refactoring tools, and version control. What other things need to be integrated before it can be blessed as an IDE?
  - tomjen3 3y ago
    Does it or are they available as a plugin?
    - IshKebab 3y ago
      Yes. These features are directly supported by VSCode. They aren't added via plugins. Support for specific languages/debuggers/build systems is provided by extensions. Look up how LSP and DAP work for example. A hugely successful extensible IDE system.
  - hateful 3y ago
    This is what I'm saying! At the risk of ad hominum - I feel like a lot of the comments classifying VSCode as merely a text editor haven't really used it for development - at least not directly or in a long time. Though this whole thread could really be considered off-topic since the original post is about Visual Studio for Mac!

jug 3y ago

With Microsoft backtracking on their Visual Studio non-Code designer interface and no longer offering it for modern Windows apps (WinUI 3)… Honestly… Is this a long term plan to just sunset Visual Studio? It always felt like it to me. From the get go. But they deny it. Still, Visual Studio is so heavy, feels sluggish, written in WPF, and not from an era of modern, plugin-based software development. Visual Studio Code also offers many features VS don’t. Oh, and it perfectly debugged Python code on Windows for me (VS somehow failed to attach its debugger to Python.exe) and auto-detected venv’s for me from the mere folder structure, none of which Visual Studio did. Code feels like the .NET Core of Microsoft editors to me. Not only new thing for cross-platform development, but the next thing for Windows development too. Just like .NET Core. Sure, Code still miss things but those only feel like extensions away at best. A far better and less monolithic design. Now, if we could only have it be WebView2 based rather than Electron on Windows and cut 50% RAM use right off the bat…

delfinom 3y ago
Dunno man, to me VSCode feels sluggish. It takes a significant amount of clicks debugging C++. I can't just have the file and debug views present at the same time, I have to keep jumping back and forth. The launch json config system also introduced a ridiculous amount of verbosity, not to mention it's insanely easy to multi launch instances and confuse yourself.
alexvoda 3y ago
The WPF version of VS has supported many plugins from the start (2010). The previous version (2003-2008) also supported plugins but not sure how extensively. Before that VS was just the name for a suite of different tools (Visual C++, Visual Basic, Visual InterDev and a few others).
- jug 3y ago
  Absolutely but it just feels like VS Code has taken the extension based model even more to its heart. I think the difference was striking when I first started using it. What would be bundled with VS is often just an extension in Code. It’s wholly language agnostic in that regard. Even JavaScript, Python or their own C# requires an extension for anything but the lightest support such as syntax. It’s based around linters and language servers, often outsourced to third parties to relieve Microsoft of the burden besides their own technologies. It just comes across as the more sensible way to build an editor or IDE without overwhelming your own team and making it more maintainable in the long run. And ultimately that this will even show up in the quality of the product they market itself.