So I started my coding journey with Python about 2 years ago. I primarily used IDLE which was super bare bones but was perfect for my needs.
I’m now toying around with Javascript with eventual aspirations to learn C# and maybe something else (Golang maybe, C++ is intimidating). I completed codecademy.com’s course on Javascript, have been running through some algo training on codewars, been playing a little BitBurner, but now I want to actually try to develop my own stuff.
Looks like Visual Studio has an environment that supports Javascript, Python, and C# in one place. How is it? What are some of the positives and negatives of choosing to use Visual Studio moving forward?
VS Community edition is kind of the demo/education version of Microsoft’s paid line of IDEs. It’s been a long time since I used the community version so I can’t say if the community edition would make for a great daily driver but I use the paid version every day and it has a lot of great tools that make my work a lot easier.
Unfortunately it seems they cut some of the essential debugging tools out in the free version. The Pro/Enterprise editions are out of most folks price range so the paid line is mostly used by folks who get it through work. I guess it may still be worth giving a try if you intend to work on any of the MS developed technologies.
For personal projects I usually use VSCode. It has some unusual quirks due to being designed around extensions but those extensions really turn it into the swiss army knife of IDEs. The “Remote Development” extension especially has been great with my homelab projects as it lets me edit files on my headless Linux VMs from my Windows PC in a relatively user friendly IDE.
Thanks for your input. I took it for a test drive (VS Community) and it seemed ok, took a little fussing to get it to recognize that I already had Python installed. My confusing bit right now is that I have closed a .py file, a, working on a different one, but when I hit run it runs the previous script so I must have something screwed up.
I’ll check out vscode.
Yeah, that behavior is probably a holdover from how it handles running C#, C++, etc projects. Right click on the file you want to run in Solution Explorer and you should see an option to “Set as Startup Item”. The current startup item will be indicated in bold text.
Unfortunately it seems they cut some of the essential debugging tools out in the free version.
I’m not seeing many differences between the Community and Professional version of VS. I’ve only ever used Professional on the job, and I haven’t really noticed too much difference in the way Community works when I use it for my hobby stuff.