I have always been a user of Visual Studio proper; I have heard people talk about VS Code, and decided to check it out.

I’m impressed with how small the initial download and install was. Less than 200 MB of disk space was required on my Windows 10 PC.

The install process took less than a minute! This is much much faster than Visual Studio which could sometimes take over 30 minutes to install.

I started up the application; the dark theme came up immediately, and I started to feel right at home..

Now I want to write some C# code. What? I need to download an extension to use C#? that seems kind of strange… I’m still not sure exactly why this OmniSharp server is necessary, is this only for .Net Core? The idea of VS Code to be more modular and cross platform.

Why are there so many extensions? Coming from using mostly more legacy Microsoft development tools, I’m not used to everything being open sourced as we are seeing in the extension list here.

I’m going to need to spend more time studying the environment, and how everything works here.

I’ve always loved the full features of Visual studio proper, and fell it is the best IDE out there. But I recognize that Visual Studio has been around for a long time. What would Microsoft do if they could build a simplified IDE is what we get with VS Code. .

Opening a project as a folder is really weird. I have some folders that have sub folders that contain additional projects. VS Code doesn’t seem to recognize projects contained in these sub directories the way Visual Studio would via the .sln file.

VS Code seems to promote a different way of working, more in line with .NET Core methodology of interoperability, flexibility,minimalism, and seems to strongly prefer json and the command line to text config files.

So my advise to anyone who has not used this before. VS Code is very different; it does not appear to be an easy transition to start using this for something like a web forms projects. I’m sure it would work better if you using pure .Net Core.

Nonetheless, absolutely love the speed of VS code, and I am going to spend more time with this, explore the different extensions, and see how it goes..

Zen mode is so cool…

Zen Mode

Ctrl + K, Z — can we please get this for Visual Studo proper?