Visual Studio Code is based on a much older line (visual studio) which dates back to 1997.
It's not nearly so new as it may seem, although I certainly appreciate the refresh from the older, more feature-filled (and feature slowed) visual studio proper.
Not to mention - most of the "new stuff" in visual studio code is really just a nice UI layer that's built using mature and incredibly battle tested tooling - HTML/CSS/JS.
It comes from the same parent company, with a lot of interest in solving many of the same challenges. The UI paradigms are obviously related, and if you've ever done any real VS project debugging, you'll find the structure of those configuration files very (very) similar to how tasks work in VSCode.
I don't believe the VSCode codebase ever actually pulled anything from the original visual studio, but the roots of the application clearly come from the same place.
It's not meaningfully based on VS proper beside the name. The main difference is it lives in a very different ecological niche. Microsoft wouldn't have taken up its development if it didn't.
I can’t really use VS code for work (PHP support is nonexistent compared to PHPStorm), but I needed to make some changes to a C++ codebase in WSL. VS couldn’t get anything to work, I couldn’t even get it to compile. VS code got compiling and step debugging via gdb working after just a few tweaks to the make file and tasks. Worked like a charm.
Upvoted but disagree. VS Code and VS have totally different lineages and probably not much shared code under the hood. I've used VS for many years (best IDE bar none, in my opinion) and when I started playing with VS Code I couldn't help but think they should have chosen a different name.
I appreciate what VSCode is achieving, though, I can run on my Linux host and remote into my microcontroller bare-bones OS for debugging and everything works nicely together but it ain't no Visual Studio.
The reason the binary is called "code" is because the name "Visual Studio" was applied at the last minute by marketing - this was told directly to me by one of the program managers involved in the launch.
Visual Studio Code is based on a much older line (visual studio) which dates back to 1997.
It's not nearly so new as it may seem, although I certainly appreciate the refresh from the older, more feature-filled (and feature slowed) visual studio proper.
Not to mention - most of the "new stuff" in visual studio code is really just a nice UI layer that's built using mature and incredibly battle tested tooling - HTML/CSS/JS.