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Microsoft's cross-platform Visual Studio Code editor hits 1.0

Microsoft's lightweight code editor for Windows, OS X and Linux, Visual Studio Code, has hit the 1.0 milestone.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

Announced at Microsoft's Build 2015 developers conference a year ago, Visual Studio Code -- the company's lightweight cross-platform code editor -- has hit the 1.0 milestone.

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Microsoft officials blogged about availability of the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) 1.0 release on April 14, noting that more than 500,000 developers are using VS Code each month. There have been two million installs of VS Code since the public preview was released in March 2015, Microsoft officials said.

When Microsoft originally unveiled VS Code, the product was positioned as being for JavaScript and TypeScript developers creating Web apps. But since then, developers have built more than 1,000 extensions to the product, providing support for C++, C#, React Native, Python, PHP, F#, Node.js, JSON, Go and more languages and frameworks.

Full-blown Visual Studio runs only on Windows, and supports projects and solutions. VS Code is based on files/folders, and is especially suited to building cross-platform Web and cloud applications.

VS Code can trace its roots back to work done by Microsoft's "Monaco" team, which was charged with building a subset of Visual Studio that would run in a browser. It evolved to become an editing tool that could be installed on Windows, OS X and Linux and used for any type of code editing, navigating, debugging and working with Git.

VS Code can be downloaded for free and works on Windows 7, 8 and 10; Linux x64 (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS), and OS X Yosemite and El Capitan.

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