Lab 1 Preparation

Development Environment Part 1

The Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

For our programming labs, we’re going to be using VSCode, available for all operating systems here: https://code.visualstudio.com/.

VSCode is not a text editor (though it can edit text). It’s an IDE. You can think of an IDE as a performing many of the functions of a full-fledged word processor, it helps you write code by reducing keystrokes (intelligently formatting code), suggesting function syntax, color-coding and a ton of other handy features.

On of the big benefits of an IDE is that many have a built-in code debugging environment (e.g., it can catch errors in your code before the compiling stage).

Can you guess which tool is more useful?

Before coming to Lab 1, please be sure you’ve done the following:

1. Downloaded VSCode
2. Verified that you can create a new file and find it on your computer (e.g., Desktop, Documents…)