Microsoft makes Visual Studio Code open source

The Visual Studio Code editor is made open source by Microsoft. In addition, it has added extension support to the editor with currently over 50 extensions, including additional languages, debuggers, Powershell, color themes, Go, and Yeoman.

Microsoft made this known to the world at the Microsoft Connect meeting. In addition, it also released a beta of a plugin for the Visual Studio programming development environment that enables remote debugging of Linux and Internet-of-things devices. The plugin preview is called Visual Studio GDB Debugger Extension and requires Visual Studio 2015 or higher. With this, the development platform can now be used to develop for Android, iOS, Linux, Azure, Office and Windows.

Making Visual Studio Code open source follows the Preview version shown on April 28 at the Build developer conference. With this update, the VS Code version number is 0.10.1 and in addition to the extension support, the ability to create custom extensions with the Extensibility SDK has been added. In this version, among other things, the debugging console has been updated and now offers colored text to highlight errors and warnings. The full list of changes and additions can be found in the updates.

The interface of Visual Studio Code, or VSCode, is based on Google’s Blink layout engine. The source code editor runs on Windows, Linux and OS X and is offered for free alongside the ‘regular’ version of Visual Studio. Code does not provide a complete IDE. The VS Code software is based on Visual Studio Online and the Electron framework.