Today at Build Microsoft announced the release of a native Visual Studio application for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Named Visual Studio Code, the company considers to be a “code focused” editor available free of charge to all developers. While part of the Visual Studio family, it has a different feature set than the traditional VS IDE.
VS Code focuses on the following top line features: IntelliSense, built-in debugging, and Git source control integration. IntelliSense support is complemented by Outlining, Find All References, and Go To Definition. The debugging tools include the familiar breakpoints, code stepping, and variable inspection. Thanks to the design of VS Code, additional languages can be supported without changing the application. (According to Microsoft, this functionality will be exposed to end users once documentation is finalized.) This means that while the current version targets ASP.NET development, this is not a permanent restriction and only a result that it is still a preview.
Git support is a big part of the VS Code project, but in order to use this support a local copy of Git will need to be installed on your system. The advantage is that only a single Git instance needs to be configured with the minor inconvenience of requiring a separate install from VS Code. However if Git is already setup on your system, you should be able to install VS Code and use it immediately.
When comparing VS Code to traditional Visual Studio, the biggest difference is that VS Code focuses on being a full featured editor, whereas VS offers a lot more features around projects. VS Code doesn't have new project wizards or solution files. But it does offer responsive editing, and emphasizes the small details like displaying what the type of line endings are used when working on cross-platform files.
VS Code is able to support the big 3 platforms thanks to being built on top of GitHub’s Electron platform. Electron is itself composed of io.js and Chromium. VS Code is written using TypeScript, the Microsoft created language that is built as a superset of JavaScript.
VS Code is currently available in a Preview form for all clients (Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows). Microsoft notes that users are required to accept that crash dumps are automatically sent to Microsoft for review. If users do not agree, Microsoft suggests that they should not download the software.