Introduction
Whether you're a beginning or an experienced developer, you need the right coding tool to create, edit, manage, run, and debug code. There are many different tools available. Some are essentially, simple text editors. Others, such as Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), can have many advanced features and built-in support for multiple programming languages. The trade-off for full-featured IDEs is that they often have a larger installation footprint and a steeper learning curve than simpler code editors.
So how do you know which coding tool is right for you? It depends on what your needs are. For example, what programming languages are you using? Do you need to integrate with a source control management (SCM) provider such as GitHub?
Example scenario
Suppose you're building a website for a restaurant in your hometown. You know that you want to create the pages using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In addition, you'd like to be able to debug your code and view your site locally on your computer as you're testing. You also want to incorporate a version control system to manage changes to your webpages.
In addition, suppose the restaurant needs to create an inventory management system in C++ for their employees to use from desktops in the kitchen and back office. You want to make sure that your code editor supports C++ syntax, libraries, compilers, and debuggers.
Furthermore, suppose the restaurant's chef asks if you can help them with data analytics. The chef would like you to examine trends in sales of pizza when the local sports clubs win matches or games. You're comfortable using Python and Jupyter notebooks for your data science work and want a code editor that supports that language and tool.
What will we be doing?
In this module, we help you evaluate if Visual Studio Code is the right code editor for various scenarios. You also learn about the Visual Studio Code features that you can customize and configure to support many different types of development work.
What is the main goal?
By the end of this module, you have the knowledge to be able to evaluate if Visual Studio Code meets your set of programming requirements.
Note
You may have heard about other products in the Visual Studio family, such as Visual Studio and Visual Studio for Mac, and wonder if they're related to Visual Studio Code. They are different products. Visual Studio is a full-featured IDE for Windows development, and Visual Studio for Mac is an IDE that runs on macOS and is used for developing .NET applications.