The defacto IDE standard
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Microsoft Visual Studio Code is our predominant IDE (integrated development environment) that we use both internally and with clients.
We use it to develop applications and platforms with clients across all verticals.
It being free to use, and with an open source core, means we can easily bring it with us to clients without having to engage in procurement and licensing.
Additionally our engineers are provided internally with GitHub Copilot, and it is often available on clients, integrating directly into our IDE.
Pros
- Large ecosystem of extensions, you can nearly always find an extension for the project you're working on
- First party integration for language servers allows for rapid feedback during development
- First class support for dev containers allows us to reduce setup related issues during development
Cons
- GitHub Copilot integration lags behind what is available in Cursor and equivalents
- Support for certain languages lags behind more specialised IDEs, e.g. java with IntelliJ
- Better support for debugging slow extensions
Likelihood to Recommend
As a general workhorse IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio Codee is unmatched. Building on the early success of applications such as Atom, it has long been the standard for electron based IDEs.
It can be outshone using IDEs that are dedicated to particular platforms, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code for .net and the Jetbrains IDEs for Java, Python and others.
For remote collaborative development, something like Zed is ahead of VSCode live share, which can be quite flakey.
