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VS Code has a growing variety of users beyond professional developers.
Image: Getty Images / iStockphoto
The Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) code editor is only five years old, but the developer tool has been impressively adopted by the global developer population.
VS Code now has 14 million users, Microsoft reports (according to Statista, there are around 24 million developers worldwide), and it gained five million new users during 2020 due to a variety growing users beyond professional developers and the need for remote development during the COVID-19 pandemic. In June of last year, Microsoft said that VS Code has 11 million users. Its success is based on GitHub, Electron, Chromium, JavaScript and Microsoft’s JavaScript superset, TypeScript.
Julia Liuson, vice president of Microsoft’s developer division, believes the growth in adoption of VS Code has come as people beyond professional developers are increasingly finding the need to use the editor.
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“Traditionally we only saw professional developers, but we see a very wide range of users – people doing DevOps, people doing IT administration, we see a lot of students using the tools. “Liuson told ZDNet.
Since it is a text editor, people don’t even need to know how to code to use the software. Even some journalists use VS Code to write stories, according to Liuson.
“The VS Code strategy is really to support our any, any, any strategy. You can be a developer working with any programming language, working on any operating system, and developing n ‘ any type of software. ”
VS Code works on macOS, Windows 10, and several Linux distributions, it supports Arm64 on Linux, and works on Raspberry Pi and Chromebooks. It is also available as a preview for the initial versions of VS Code on the M1 chips based on Apple’s arm.
Part of the popularity of VS Code is the breadth of language extensions for C ++, C #, Python, and various Python libraries for data scientists, Java, and JavaScript / Typescript.
“When we launched VS Code, we took this approach where we really wanted to lead where there is the most demand. We have very tight integration of VS Code and TypeScript. VS Code is based on TypeScript. But we have invested heavily in language extensions, ”said Liuson.
“We have nearly two million Python developers using VS Code and over one million C ++ developers using VS Code. And even our use of Java is approaching one million.”
GitHub, the code-sharing site acquired by Microsoft in 2018, is also central to the company’s open development processes for some products like VS Code, Typescript, and some of its revamped retro software like PowerToys.
Liuson also spoke about Microsoft’s internal source approach to software development. The company doubled its internal source use in 2019 and recently highlighted its internal source approach as a factor that mitigated the threat of SolarWinds hackers accessing its source code.
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Microsoft did not invent the term internal source, and the approach is to adopt open source development practices and apply them within a single organization. GitHub and GitHub’s Enterprise Server integrate seamlessly with this approach to help organizations collaborate but do so in private.
“Internal source means you have a private IP address, but you invite other teams in the company to collaborate with you. This is the fundamental difference between open source and internal source. Today, this is very common in large enterprises – there are too many silos – but in the microservices architecture you sometimes have to debug an issue, ”said Liuson.“ This is when you are looking to debug an issue. ” use the open source model in a business context, with the right permissions. To me, it’s not that different from the way people collaborate on SharePoint, Word documents, or G Suite. ”
Liuson claims that the VS Code feature called Live Share, launched in 2017, is becoming a “ton of adoption” due to WFH practices, while Microsoft is investing heavily in IntelliCode, its code completion based feature. on AI. IntelliCode is an extension for VS Code and supports code completion for TypeScript and JavaScript, Python, Java, C ++, C # and Java.
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