I am still not one hundred percent used to seeing Microsoft releasing software cross platform and actually acknowledging there are other operating systems out there. Still, they seem more and more to be doing just that.
To that end, they have released a preview version of Visual Studio Code.
"Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and
available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows."
Sure, it's a far cry from the full on Visual Studio solution, but lets face it. For those developing applications on Linux and OSX platforms there are already good tools out there to do that. It's interesting to see Microsoft making an effort not only to release cross platform software, but also to release developer tools to enable developers to create cross platform software.
Running it on Linux (Fedora 21)
After I downloaded Visual Studio Code for Linux and attempted to extract it (using File-roller) I received an error message. "An error occurred while extracting files"
"Typical" I thought. So I opened a terminal and unzipped it from there. It worked.
After extracting in the terminal I executed the binary "./Code" and away it went.
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| Microsoft Visual Studio Code running on Linux (Fedora 21) working with PHP and Javascript |
The editor seems very basic, but it is still a preview release. However, it was quick and included syntax highlighting for php and javascript. It contained no "project" support that I could see, beyond opening a directory (Folder they still call it) and listing the files contained inside.
It was simple to split the editor in order to look at both a PHP and a Javascript file at the same time which is very nice.
I've only just experimented for a few minutes and I can honestly say, it isn't about to replace my current tools but it is nice. Give it a go yourself and see what you think.
