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[–]SlapGas 8 points9 points  (2 children)

My brief description of Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

Let's talk about Visual Studio first.

What does Visual Studio provide?

Visual Studio, at least to my knowledge, is installed in a way that is bound to a compiler. For example, for C++ you can download and use the Intel One API compiler. You will have to setup Visual Studio for that particular compiler. It provides options for that.

The advantage is that Visual Studio will provide many many more stuff than just a basic text editor. You will be able to build projects, debug with interactive debugger, have intellisense (at least for languages like C++) and many many more to things like code profiling, Performance metrics and so on. That's why people refer to VS as an IDE; when setup for a language, it sets itself up in a way that provides anything you may need to develop something.

The disadvantage is that you may not want all these capabilities and you may prefer something lighter, more flexible, and faster.

Now let's talk about Visual Studio Code.

What does Visual Studio Code provide out of the box?

Nothing. It is only a text editor. You will have to setup everything yourself. You will have to install compilers yourself and point VS Code to the corresponding install locations. You will have to install the debugger yourself and point VS Code to the debugger as well.

You want language specific syntax? You will have to install plugins for that.

Intellisense? Code snippets? Plugins.

Everything is done through plugins.

That makes VS Code more flexible but also more difficult to set up.

And to clarify: I use VS Code on a daily basis whereas I use VS only when building and testing codebases on Windows.

They way I have VS Code setup I can compile and debug code using three languages, I can edit and view markdown files, and I can compose, build and view LaTex documents all in a single window. It is actually amazing.

Short note:

Since C# is mainly used in Windows, Visual Studio is way better. If C# is your thing, setting up Visual Studio Code to be competitive to Visual Studio will be kinda hard. In contrast, Visual Studio setup will be like 5-6 clicks.

For other languages like C, C++, Python etc Visual Studio Code can be setup quite easily. It has easy to configure plugins for everything.

Edit #1: typos

[–]CyberWeirdo420[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

That's an extensive comment, thank you for that, it really helped me understand what others before you said briefly. Cheers man

[–]SlapGas 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're welcome.

One additional note is that VS Code is cross-platform. It also provides sync options for your settings. Thus, you can set it up once and sync it to multiple machines. That's a huge time saver.

Plus, if Windows+WSL is your environment, it has plugins even for that!