Microsoft Releases Visual Studio Editor for Win, Linux, and Mac on Github

Microsoft has released the source-code for the Visual Studio Editor on github with versions for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX under the MIT license. This is Microsoft’s first cross platform development environment. This is a free, cross platform, lightweight editor from Microsoft. The latest version supports plug-ins.  Setup instructions for all platforms can be found here.

Additional Tools

Visual Studio Code integrates with existing tool chains. We think the following tools will enhance your development experiences.

• ASP.NET 5 – a lean and composable framework for building web and cloud applications, fully open source and available on GitHub
• Node.js (includes NPM) – a platform for easily building fast, scalable network applications
• Git – VS Code has built-in support for source code control using Git
• Yeoman – an application scaffolding tool, you can think of this as File | New Project for VS Code
• generator-aspnet – a yeoman generator for scaffolding ASP.NET 5 applications, run npm install -g generator-aspnet to install
• hottowel – a yeoman generator for quickly creating AngularJS applications, runnpm install -g generator-hottowel to install
• Express – an application framework for Node.js applications, uses the Jade template engine
• gulp – a streaming task runner system, integrates with VS Code tasks
• mocha – a JavaScript test framework that runs on Node.js
• bower – a client side package manager
• TypeScript – brings structure and strong typing to your JavaScript code, without compromising the good parts
• TypeScript definition manager – search and download 100’s of TypeScript definition files for popular JavaScript frameworks, providing great IntelliSense in VS Code

Next Steps

See the following after installing and setting up VS Code.

• The Basics – Basic orientation around VS Code
• Editing Evolved – Lint, IntelliSense, Lightbulbs, Peek and Goto Definition and more
• Debugging – The VS Code debugger