I don't agree. Visual Studio Code lacks the actual 'visual' part, like the form builder.

That is a good point about the name, never thought about it. And if I ever wanted to write gui code that only worked in windows, I guess I'd consider it? But that has never been a use case for me, and everything else about vscode is better.

What can VS Code do that Visual Studio can’t?

>> What can VS Code do that Visual Studio can’t?

Run natively on Linux:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux

Set breakpoints and step through rust code running remotely on a microcontroller?

Yeah, it's superior to Visual Studio because it's more like Emacs, a text editor.

Emacs users saw the benefits of a single text editor a long, long time ago. Back when I started programming it was common for people to use a different IDE per language. There was VS, Eclipse, Dreamweaver etc. I thought that was insane. It's been funny seeing people finally realise the same a decade later.

counterpoint:

JetBrains IDEs are the sweetspot between absolute single purpose IDEs (like Eclipse) and text editors that require plugins to be useful (broadly speaking).

I am all in on JetBrains, to be perfectly transparent, but I have yet to see anything come close to the seamless experience I've had with their IDEs

Eclipse a single purpose IDE? Back when eclipse was the dominant java IDE, it almost felt as if a language did not exist before it had its very own eclipse plugin.

Yeah, didn’t they market themselves as the framework for IDEs? I can remember in the late 2000s Eclipse was very popular in the php community. The C/C++ plugin was also widely used.

Try publishing a .net webforms project in vs code. Or jetbrains Rider for that matter.

The gauntlet has been thrown! I respectfully decline the challenge, as I am no longer a gentleman of the ViewState society.

And so is emacs, but nobody has an issue calling it a text editor.

For Windows development Visual Studio is still more powerful. People who have developed solely on Macs or juniors who started in 2020 with only web dev experience won't understand and they're usually the ones that have the "VS Code is better" opinion.

I've developed in .NET, I've even worked with a large .NET monolith ( > 100 devs). Even in that circumstance while visual studio was installed by default, most devs used vs code. It's not just them young ones anymore.

As someone who's used vs code occasionally but still primarily uses visual studio what are the big benefits you see of vs code of the traditional visual studio?

For me personally the use of vs was only during my studies. A comparison by me between the tools I've actually used extensively would be between emacs and code.

Someone mentioned the visual aspact of vs. That I've literally used once, at the very start of my bachelor. Vs is confusing, huge, and densely feature packed. I think I just never took the time to enjoy the features vs has.

This isn't weird when you consider my top choices: vs code and emacs both share the characteristic that they get out of the way when I'm doing my stuff. I usually want the bare bones, vim keybinds enabled workflow when I'm working, because it's fastest and it's what I know. I can use smart features like var renaming, autorefactoring etc. in all of these options, but in vs code and in emacs I feel less like they're butting in when I don't want them to, and when I'm changing settings or executing commands I'm not traversing a dense jungle of menus, settings and options like in vs.

In short for me the experience is easier and therefore more flow like.

More like juniors who started in 2016.