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?
Be aware of differences below:
- Visual Studio 2022 / 2019 is All-in-one IDE software (like PyCharm of Python)
- Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is simple Text editor with IDE functions and several extensions
Yes exactly. I believe OP is talking about the former, but what he really wants is the latter
Personally I think as a beginner VS is better than VS Code. I’m a professional and VS Code is still overwhelming to me because of the palette system instead of easy drop down menus and whatnot. I want to like VS Code but I can’t get past not knowing what the commands are for the multitude of plugins I need to mimic even a fraction of VS’s capabilities.
Yeah, I get that. I feel vs code is in this super weird limbo of a wannabe user friendly editor, but really not. And you have to deal with json configurations and whatnot. Honestly, for me jetbrains ides are the best full blown ides out there (even though I’m personally using neovim at the moment). I do believe though that vs code has its perks, such as being completely multiplatform and very popular on the web (that is, you can easily find solutions for your problems).
I daily-drive both Visual Studio 2022 and Visual Studio Code in my day job, doing C++ and JavaScript/React development. In general, I find Visual Studio more useful for C++ (especially when debugging) and VS Code more useful for web-based technology like JavaScript. VS is much heavier, and to use it properly you really need to have your solution/projects set up properly. There’s a lot of complexity to the IDE, which is great when you need it but not when you don’t.
VS Code is much lighter-weight and is better if you just want to open a folder as a workspace and do your debugging using something like Chrome dev-tools. I also find search functionality a bit more straightforward in VS Code than VS. The down-side of VS, specifically when talking about compiled languages like C++ and C#, is it’s not set up to build a project out-of-the-box. You have to configure that yourself. That’s not really an issue for something like JavaScript. Another down-side is that you might need to search for an extension to get some functionality you want (such as various language support extensions, or stuff like GitLens), and using a lot of extensions will slow down VS Code.
To sum up, VS 2022 is great for stuff like C++ or C#, where you need the complexity. But VS Code is better for stuff like JavaScript where you don’t.
VS is great. Even the Community edition is a fully-fledged IDE. It has robust debugging and profiling tools. Intellisense is wonderful.
It does have some minor annoyances if you ever find yourself having to manually modify project files but otherwise, it’s by far and away my favorite IDE (followed closely behind by IntelliJ)
Is it VisualStudio or VisualStudio Code? They’re two separate products.
Visual Studio Installer says ‘Visual Studio Community 2022’. Opening the application it is only called ‘Visual Studio 2022’.
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.
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.
I have made the decision to completely switch from full studio to vs code for my c# development about a year ago. and I haven’t regretted it so far. I work in a company that has a lot of microservices so I tend to switch between projects often.
And with the C# dev kit they just released setting vs code up for c# development is no effort.
I also recently started using profiles more in vs code to quickly switch between c# and web development, and I’m a fan.