What is VS Code and C# Dev Kit?

(upbeat music) (whooshing) - Hi everyone, I'm Leslie Richardson from the .NET team and welcome to C# and .NET Development in VS Code for Beginners, which is a really long title. But in short, we are going to be spending this series talking about how easy it is for you to get started with writing your C# applications in VS Code using the C# Dev Kit extension. To give a little more detailed ground of what's being covered in the series, in this first episode, we are going to be doing some definitions. So talking first about what even is VS Code, or Visual Studio Code, and what is the C# Dev Kit extension? And then in the next episode we are going to talk about how easy it is to install both VS Code and C# Dev Kit, followed by the good stuff. So mostly demo focused from there on out. Project management, so how easy it is to manage your files, create new projects, all of that with your C# applications in VS Code. And then C# productivity tools, debugging, testing, and finally an outro and learning more about how you can contribute to the wider C# community and the wider VS Code community. So starting from square one, we are going to cover some definitions such as what is VS Code and C# Dev Kit? So what is VS Code? VS Code or Visual Studio Code is a lightweight source code editor. It provides multi-language support such as JavaScript, TypeScript, C++, Java, C# of course. And all of this is really nice because there might be cases where maybe you want to write a web app that has a JavaScript frontend and a C# backend, and you want to be able to use multiple languages together, VS Code lets you do all of that. VS Code also provides cross-platform support, meaning that you can develop from your Windows machine, Linux, Mac, there's nowhere where you really can't develop using VS Code, including the cloud. So VS Code lets you code from pretty much anywhere with additions of GitHub Codespaces and Microsoft Dev Box, and even your own web browser. So no matter where you are, no matter what machine you have, whether you're local or you're remote, you can code anywhere. And VS Code is also open source, which results in having a thriving community of contributors like yourself. So if you'd like to get involved and learn more about how to contribute your own ideas to the VS Code experience, we'll talk more about that in a later episode. And at its core, VS Code is very extension driven. Extensions are the bread and butter of what makes up VS Code in terms of user customization and creating that ideal development environment. So if you're unfamiliar with extensions, these are basically add-ons that you can install from VS Code that will expand the existing feature set or tool set or add new features to your experience in VS Code. So to give some examples, in the picture that you can see here, we've got a Python extension, which provides Python capabilities. We've got C++, there's a GitHub one. All of these expand on the basic source code editor that makes up VS Code by default and introduces the ability to write new languages or maybe add new themes to your environment. And C# Dev Kit of course is one of those extensions which we're going to be honing in on. But before that, I want to give a quick compare and contrast between Visual Studio Code and the Visual Studio IDE. Chances are if you've looked up one of them then you've probably seen the other. And you're probably wondering, well, what's the difference between the two? So first up, VS Code is an editor-based experience, whereas Visual Studio IDE is an integrated development environment or IDE for short. And basically what this means is that Visual Studio has a greater emphasis on the development workflow loop from start to finish in regards to the tools that it provides upfront. So whereas VS Code is very extension driven and you kind of have to add some of those additional features such as debugging capabilities, advanced tooling, advanced testing with the power of extensions, when you first install Visual Studio, it provides a lot more of that out of the box customization and tooling for you. So you don't have to necessarily install additional extensions in order to accomplish your development needs a lot of the time. And finally, VS Code provides cross-platform support across both Mac and Linux, whereas Visual Studio IDE is Windows focused. So sometimes you might see Visual Studio being called Visual Studio Win, and that's why. So the good news is, is that you can use both of these if you want to, but there might be cases where you might choose one over the other. For instance, if you love debugging and you want to take advantage of every debugging and diagnostics tool known to man that's extremely powerful and helpful, then you might want to go the Visual Studio route, which has one of the coolest debuggers in the industry today I think. Or similarly, if you want to have more of that editor base that's more lightweight, can be easier to learn up on, especially if you're trying to get started with writing some code, then VS Code might be the place to go for you. So whatever floats your boat, there's really not a bad option here. They're both part of the Visual Studio family. And now let's get to some good stuff. So for the remainder of the series, we are specifically going to hone in on the C# Dev Kit extension. This is an official Microsoft extension that provides rich C# language support and productivity features. And you might notice along the way that if you are somebody who already uses Visual Studio, we've taken a lot of those big productivity features from Visual Studio, such as the Solution Explorer and some testing capabilities, debugging capabilities, and integrated them into VS Code. And we didn't just drop them into VS Code either. We made sure to streamline them so that they're organic and that they make sense in the context of VS Code. And because C# Dev Kit is a VS Code extension, this enables you to write C# pretty much anywhere, whether that's locally, in the cloud, in Visual Studio, in VS Code. There's really no excuse as to why you can't write C# on your machine at this point, which is pretty neat. So as for what's included in C# Dev Kit, we're going to explore this in more detail in future episodes, but C# Dev Kit is really more of an extension pack and not just a singular extension. So this means that when you first install C# Dev Kit, you are getting multiple extensions at once. This includes the base C# extension, which is what is going to provide that rich C# editing experience, such as formatting and linting and just improved performance and reliability, code actions, all of that. And then you've got the IntelliCode for C# Dev Kit extension, which provides AI powered start and whole line completions. And then the C# Dev Kit extension itself provides those new windows such as the Solution Explorer for managing projects and an advanced test explorer for being able to identify and recognize any tests that you build and being able to run and debug from there, as well as a couple other things that we'll explore later. If you want to take your development environment a step further than that, let's say you want to do some cross plat UI work with .NET MAUI or you're a game dev and you want to write some Unity code. As long as you have the C# Dev Kit extension installed, you can install the .NET MAUI extension and the Unity extensions and basically have that environment that you need to get started with whatever program that you're trying to write, which is really nice. And that concludes me talking at you. (laughing) Thanks so much for watching this intro video. We've got a lot of exciting content ahead in the next coming episode. So join me next time when we talk about how easy it is to install VS Code and C# Dev Kit. (upbeat music)