Demonstrating their ongoing commitment to reach developers on the platforms that they use, Microsoft has made their multiplatform Visual Studio Code (VSCode) editor available on GitHub. Previously freely available in binary-only form for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, today’s announcement means that developers can rely on it to be a part of their toolset long-term.
This November release (v0.10.1) of the editor also provides support for extensions and an offers an Extension SDK to make writing extensions easier. Some of the first extensions available provide support for Go, PowerShell, and CMake. Extensions are not limited to language support, the Debugger for Chrome extension provides the ability to write your JavaScript in VSCode and debug it during operation on the Chrome web browser.
There are some handy usability updates in v0.10.1 too. The syntax highlighting has been expanded to better support TextMate themes and to make more language keywords available for highlighting. PHP users can take advantage of the PHP linter when working with their PHP code.
Full details on all of the changes are available on the VS Code Release Notes. (Note that the static link has yet to be provided so future updates will age this link.) The VS Code project is licensed under the MIT License, and binaries are available for download if you would like to test drive the editor. Note that the automatic transmission of crash dumps to Microsoft is now configurable, so VS Code can now be used in development settings that require higher confidentiality and/or privacy.
