the big questions in life are Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker, Captain Kirk or Captain Picard, VS Code or Visual Studio. Now, I can't help you with the first of those two, but I am going to help you with the last. I'm going to give you specific advice on what to use based on the operating system and technology stacks that you're developing for. Let's get some of the basics out of the way first. You can download VS Code from Microsoft using the link in the description below, and it's got great support for many different languages out of the box. It provides JavaScript and Node.js, but using extensions, you can install C#, Python, C, C++, and many, many more. In fact, this wide support has made it very popular across many different developer communities. Also, because it comes at the perfect price point, free, because it's based on the Chrome browser, you can install it on Windows, Macs, and Linux machines. Visual Studio, also from Microsoft, can be installed on Windows or Mac machines. So, if you're using Linux, then you're kind of out of luck. So, this

is going to be a very short video for you. I recommend you download and use VS Code. Thank you for watching. For the rest of us, we can look at the pricing. Now, there are three editions. The paid editions are Professional and Enterprise, and they have a monthly subscription. But the best edition is actually the Community Edition because it's free. And although it's free, it's actually got everything you need to be a useful professional developer. So, I don't think that the free version is crippled in some way that makes it not useful. It really is very useful indeed, and I recommend you try it out before you go ahead and actually pay any money for the paid editions. To highlight the difference between our two options, I'm going to create a C# console application starting with VS Code. Now, VS Code is really just a text editor with an extension capability. So, our first task is to add an extension to support C#. Then, we use some .NET command line calls to create the console application and add it into a solution file. As you can see

We're just writing out the canonical Hello World message, so there's nothing fancy going on here. VS Code doesn't know how to build and debug C# applications, but the extension for C# that we just installed will check the directory and see that there are no config files that it can understand. So, it's going to give us an option to press a button, and when we do, it's going to auto-generate some default files for us to help us. Now, if we have a look at those, we can see that it's created launch.json and tasks.json, and we can use those to then run and execute this program, and hopefully, in a moment, we'll see the Hello World message output. Creating the same project in Visual Code is much simpler. Select New Project, and then we can pick from a set of predefined templates. In our case, we choose the C# console app, enter the name of the project, and the version of .NET to build against, and our project is created. We then click Debug, and the code will compile and run, and

then, in a short time, we'll see the output terminal with the same output message. This highlights the essential difference. Visual Studio is an IDE (integrated development environment), so C# is a first-class part of the system. It has predefined templates for building projects. There's nothing extra to install or configure to be able to build and run. It's just a simpler, smoother, frictionless experience. Another example of this integrated experience are the designers. Here, you can see the WinForms designer. You can drag and drop controls onto the surface, move them around, update properties, and so forth. Another example is the designer for WPF applications. Changes to the XAML code are immediately applied to the form preview. These are the kind of rich experiences you cannot get with VS Code. So, my recommendation is that when creating a Windows-specific application (WinForms, WPF, UWP, and so forth), you should always use Visual Studio on a Windows machine. Finally, my recommendations when using Linux: you have to use VS Code. If you're building a Windows-specific application such as WinForms, WPF, definitely go for

Visual Studio. You have to use Windows anyway, and that designer experience makes a huge difference for web development. I recommend VS Code. It has a larger developer community, and it's just going to give you much better support for simple generic C# applications, such as console apps, REST APIs, that kind of thing. You could use either, and I recommend you download and try out both for at least a couple of days, and then go with whichever one you feel more comfortable with. Both will serve you well, but go with whichever feels right. Hopefully, you found this useful. If so, hit the like button, and until next time, be awesome.

Visual Studio Code vs Visual Studio

Visual Studio Code vs Visual Studio

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