Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code 1.0, a year after its initial preview.
A Microsoft team needed a few months to create the first preview of Visual Studio Code announced at //BUILD 2015. That was possible because Code is built on top of Electron, which in turn is based on Node.js and Chromium, two technologies with large adoption. Half a year later, Microsoft open sourced Code and made it extendable. Now, Visual Studio Code has been deemed worthy to be made generally available under version 1.0.
Although there are many development tools out there, VS Code has seen 2M installs so far with 500,000 active developers using it each month, according to Microsoft. Through the community’s contribution, there has been added support for more than 100 languages, over 300 pull requests have been submitted, and more than 1,000 extensions created in 5 months. There are extensions that add support for various languages, debugging, linters, themes and others. The most popular so far are C#, Python, Go, Debugger for Chrome, PowerShell and Material Theme. All this shows there is an active community built around VS Code.
To prepare for VS Code 1.0, the team focused on fixing bugs, stability and performance over the last several months. They also made Code fully localizable and it comes with support for 9 languages. But there is still a lot of work to do considering the over 800 issues open in the backlog. The community has the possibility to vote on desired features on User Voice.
Visual Studio Code is a cross platform IDE that runs as a desktop application on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It is very similar in purpose and technology used with GitHub Atom. While development for VS Code started later, the IDE catches up with Atom in terms of features, and some even suggest that Atom should do something about performance and follow Code’s lead. It is interesting to see how the two editors compare one year from now.