Visual Studio Code: Cross-Platform Editing

Originally published at blog.alexpersian.com on April 30, 2015.

Today, seeminly out of the blue, Microsoft unveiled their new code editor project titled Visual Studio Code at Build. What’s special about this editor that differentiates it from other Microsoft products is that it is cross-platform for Windows/OSX/Linux. With it’s native support for ASP.NET 5 and NodeJS application development, this could seriously improve .NET development outside of the Windows ecosystem.

You can get this new editor here. Along with the download there is already a good amount of documentation up there on their site to help you get up and running. I highly recommend taking a look over it to get familar with the editor layout and features.

So far I’ve spent a couple of hours using this editor and I have to say I’m impressed. My primary development environment up till now has been JetBrains IDE’s with SublimeText, but Code has become a serious contender for a spot.

The most prominent features for Code, outside of the standards for text editors, are probably the NodeJS/Mono debugger and the IntelliSense built in. I haven’t had a chance to test the Mono debugger, but the NodeJS version works beautifully. And the IntelliSense is absolutely beautiful! It’s implemented through the OmniSharp project and brings the full support you’d be familiar with from full Visual Studio.

The Node debugger is great!

I have some Unity projects that are written in C# that I tried out as well with IntelliSense and it pulled everything in. VS Code fully integrated into the Unity ecosystem without a hitch. All I had to do was open up the project folder and then click on the OmniSharp icon in the bottom right to select the proper project.

Click the flame

then pick your project

and start typing!

All in all I’m really impressed. I love the direction Microsoft has been going lately, and I hope they continue along this path. Being able to develop .NET and having IntelliSense on my Mac without a VM makes me smile from ear to ear. Go try it out yourself, and let me know in the comments what you think.