Microsoft launches slimmed-down Visual Studio for Mac and Linux

Microsoft is releasing a free code editor for Windows, OS X and Linux under the banner of Visual Studio. It is the first time that a Visual Studio package is available for operating systems other than Windows.

Microsoft announced the arrival of the free Visual Studio version at its Build developer conference in San Francisco. Visual Studio Code, which will be provided by Microsoft for free, coexists with the ‘regular’ version of Visual Studio. Code therefore does not offer a complete IDE development environment, but it is a code editor that includes support for finishing pieces of code, which Microsoft calls IntelliSense.

Code also has support for git version control; it is unclear whether, for example, svn is also supported. Code debugging will also be possible, although it is not known which languages ​​are supported. In any case, it concerns SQL, Ruby, XML and Visual Basic; those are languages ​​that came up during a presentation on Build. Visual Studio Code is available immediately, Microsoft announced.

Microsoft previously announced that it will make the .Net Core Runtime open source and that .Net will be available for Linux and OS X.