Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

#161

Post by marssaxman » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

aceperry wrote: post #141

krylon wrote: post #92

Ever since Nadella took over at Microsoft, such news items are becoming more and more frequent. Ten years ago, my first reaction at such a headline would have been to check my calendar if it's April 1st. Microsoft has come a long way from the company that everybody loved to hate. IMHO, they still have a long way ahead of them, but it's nice to see they seem to be serious about it. With Ballmer at the helm, I had the…

I fully agree with you there. "Microsoft has come a long way from the company that everybody loved to hate" Although, during the last few years, MS seemed to be the company that everyone ignored. But there is still a lot of built up animus against MS, due to their past business practices.

Yes, I observe that they are taking good steps and that this is clearly a positive change, but I am too old, it has been too many years, and I can't imagine that I will ever really be able to trust them.

Perhaps a younger generation can get some value out of their products, though, which would be nice for all the people who work there.

Re: Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

#162

Post by marssaxman » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:51 PM UTC

venomsnake wrote: post #73

keithwarren wrote: post #24

tldr; light weight Visual Studio for OSX/Windows/Linux with support for dozens of languages, intellisense (autocomplete), refactoring, debugging (yes, real debugging), git integration and it is free

So ... pretty much perfect?

except for the part where it's written in Javascript and is thus a bloated memory hog, yes.

Re: Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

#163

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

natem345 wrote: post #96

wlesieutre wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Azure users and native app developers on the Windows Store. With the free W10 upgrades for 7/8 users and a 30% cut of Windows Store sales, they stand to make some money. But they have to get developers back on their side first, otherwise the store stays dominated by garbage.

But aren't Store apps essentially built on the Win32 API? I remember an article basically saying '.NET didn't win' for that development. I could be recalling wrong, and I'm sure there are wrappers and such, but still...

Most of the WinAPI is abstracted out for Store apps as most will be using either .Net or JavaScript for their applications, with the latter essentially being extended/embedded web applications iirc.

I haven't paid much attention to native apps either desktop or mobile. I've built my career understanding distributed systems/communications flows and web based fromt ends... To me most of that is a better experience than what little attempts I've made at front end platform development.

Re: Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

#164

Post by markbnj » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

nothrabannosir wrote: post #56

Wow. I seriously don't know what to think anymore. What is their end game? Which platform are they hoping to become / remain dominant in? Don't get me wrong---I'm as happy as the next guy about this. VS is the only tolerable language-dedicated IDE, if they take 25% of their VS engineering mantra to this it will be better than almost anything else. But where does it end? I am clearly so not in touch with my inner mba.…

It's a good question, and the only answer I have is that when the old binary fortresses crumble you have to do something to stay relevant, and hope business opportunity will be found. I developed almost exclusively on Windows for almost twenty years, and then one day I looked at the cost of a universal MSDN sub and thought: this is getting nuts. So this is a great development, imo, because MS tools rock. I have been working in Ubuntu now for over three years, and in that time I haven't missed very much, but I have missed Visual Studio.

Re: Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

#165

Post by DougWebb » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

aceperry wrote: post #143

WDCDev wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The push to open source started under Ballmer and has been gaining momentum the past few years. You saw some of the very early open source work debut when Scott Guthrie open sourced ASP.NET MVC 2 in 2010. He (Guthrie) blogged a few times about evangelizing open source in Microsoft, and given today's news, he gained quite a bit of traction over the years. It also helped that ASP.NET MVC is a pretty sold web framework…

Funny thing is most MS devs seem to think that asp.net is on its way out.

There's ASP.Net and there's ASP.Net MVC. They're very different beasts, even though the latter is/was built upon the former. ASP.Net probably is on the way out, but MVC is not.

Re: Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

#166

Post by jodah » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

tdicola wrote: post #97

nothrabannosir wrote: post #56

Wow. I seriously don't know what to think anymore. What is their end game? Which platform are they hoping to become / remain dominant in? Don't get me wrong---I'm as happy as the next guy about this. VS is the only tolerable language-dedicated IDE, if they take 25% of their VS engineering mantra to this it will be better than almost anything else. But where does it end? I am clearly so not in touch with my inner mba.…

Yeah the real test will be, is this thing supported 5 years from now? There's a nice history of projects like Silverlight that get a lot of buzz and love early on but languish and are killed a few years later when management and priorities change.

Management in particular. It's unfortunate that new personnel always feel the need to push their own vision rather than the previous guy's, often just for the sake of it.

Re: Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

#167

Post by jstoiko » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:53 PM UTC

Lots of "Microsoft" on the front page of HN.

Re: Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

#168

Post by AdamTReineke » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:54 PM UTC

jordz wrote: post #109

sqeaky wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must agree with even though I don't want to. Microsoft seems to legitimately changing its behavior. Personally, I still want more. An open source editor would have been nice. Many good text editors are open source Vim, Emacs, Atom, Notepad++ entering this area with less community seems like an unneeded difficulty.

This editor is built on Atom.

From their docs: https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs

Architecturally, Visual Studio Code combines the best of web, native, and language-specific technologies. Using the GitHub Electron Shell, Code combines web technologies such as JavaScript and Node.js with the speed and flexibility of native apps. Code uses a newer, faster version of the same industrial-strength HTML-based editor that has powered the “Monaco” cloud editor, Internet Explorer's F12 Tools, and other projects. And Code uses a tools service architecture that enables it to use many of the same technologies that power Visual Studio, including Roslyn for .NET, TypeScript, the Visual Studio debugging engine, and more. In future previews, as we continue to evolve and refine this architecture, Visual Studio Code will include a public extensibility model that lets developers build and use plug-ins, and richly customize their edit-build-debug experience.

Re: Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

#169

Post by angrybits » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:54 PM UTC

gbl08ma wrote: post #133

The description says it's lightweight, but on my machine it uses over 200 MB of RAM with no files open, and appears to be a Chromium-based thing, much like Atom (as others pointed out, it's based on Electron). Meanwhile, Sublime Text is using less than 100 MB of RAM with dozens of files open, some of them quite big. Visual Studio tends to use less memory than this, too. If "the language services [Microsoft] built for…

Good point, I'll have to remember not to use it on any of my development workstations that have 512MB of memory.

Re: Microsoft Launches Visual Studio Code, a Free Cross-Platform Code Editor

#170

Post by guelo » Wed, Apr 29, 2015, 5:55 PM UTC

"Visual Studio Code" is deceptive marketing. It has nothing to do with Visual Studio. It's just another Javascript text editor built on top of Webkit.