Alessandro Del Sole - Visual Studio Code Distilled : Evolved Code Editing for Windows, macOS, and Linux

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484269008. For more detailed information, please visit https://www.apress.com/source-code.

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.

The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.

One of the most common requirements in software development today is building applications and services that run on multiple systems and devices, especially with the continued expansion of cloud and artificial intelligence services.

Developers have many options to build cross-platform and cross-device software, from languages to development platforms and tools. However, in most cases such tools rely on proprietary systems, therefore creating strong dependencies. Moreover, most development tools target specific platforms and development scenarios. Microsoft Visual Studio Code makes a step forward, by providing a fully featured development environment for Windows, macOS, and Linux that not only offers advanced coding features but also integrated tools that span across the entire application life cycle from coding to debugging to team collaboration.

With .NET 5 recently released and with .NET MAUI coming shortly, Visual Studio Code becomes even more important to support cross-platform development on multiple operating systems. In this book, developers with any skill will learn how to leverage Visual Studio Code to target scenarios such as web, cloud, and mobile development with the programming language of their choice, providing guidance to build apps for any system and any device.

Thanks to Joan Murray, Jill Balzano, Laura Berendson, and everyone else at Apress for the opportunity and the great teamwork on this book.

Special thanks to the technical editor, Damien Foggon, who contributed to the quality and accuracy of the contents.

Special thanks to my wife Angelica, who understands and never complains about the time I spend on writing books.

Across the book, I will refer to the product with its full name, Visual Studio Code, and its friendly names, VS Code and Code, interchangeably.

Visual Studio Code has been the first cross-platform development tool in the Microsoft Visual Studio family that runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is free, open source ( https://github.com/microsoft/vscode ), and definitely a code-centric tool, which not only makes editing code files and folder-based project systems easier but also facilitates writing cross-platform web, mobile, and cloud applications over the most popular platforms, such as Node.js and .NET 5 (including earlier versions of .NET Core), with integrated support for a huge number of languages and rich editing features such as IntelliSense, finding symbol references, quickly reaching a type definition, and much more.

Visual Studio Code is based on Electron ( https://electronjs.org/ ), a framework for creating cross-platform applications with native technologies, and combines the simplicity of a powerful code editor with the tools a developer needs to support the application lifecycle development, including debuggers and version control integration based on Git. Visual Studio Code is therefore a complete development tool, rather than being a simple code editor. For a richer development experience, you will want to consider Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 on Windows and Visual Studio 2019 for Mac on macOS, but Visual Studio Code can be really helpful in many situations.

In this book, youll learn how to use Visual Studio Code and how to get the most out of it; youll discover how you can use it both as a powerful code editor and as a complete environment for end-to-end development. Except where necessary to differentiate operating systems, figures are based on Microsoft Windows 10, but typically there is no difference in the interface on Linux and macOS. Also, Visual Studio Code includes a number of color themes that style its layout. In this book, figures display the Light (Visual Studio) theme, so you might see different colors on your own screen if you choose a different color theme. Chapter explains how to change the theme, but if you want to be consistent with the books figures, simply select