Unlike Visual Studio, VSCode is a much lighter installation that needs to take advantage of plugins for a better coding experience. Visual Studio Code, first released in 2015, is an open-source rich text editor that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. According to previous releases, you can expect a new version at least once a quarter. The latest version of Visual Studio at the time of writing is 17.1.0 and was released in February 2022. Visual Studio is ready out of the box for C# and. While the base software is feature-rich, you can enhance it with plugins developed by both Microsoft and third parties. Since it is a Microsoft IDE, it naturally integrates well into the Microsoft ecosystems such as Azure. Essentially, Microsoft set out to develop an IDE that will make it as convenient as possible for their in-house developers and anyone who wants to use C# and. Today, Visual Studio is Microsoft’s made-to-measure development environment for everything C# and. Visual Studio was first released back in 1997 as a bundle of programming tools. This primary difference sets them apart and is why you might choose one over the other. Before getting deeper into the specifics, the main distinction between these editors is that Visual Studio is a full-fledged Integrated Development Environment (IDE), while Visual Studio Code is a rich text editor.

However, aside from the common name, they have a somewhat different set of features. Nobody will fault you for confusing the two editors made by Microsoft, seeing as they pretty much have the same name.

Microsoft visual studio code