For decades, when I got to work in the morning, I would start Microsoft Visual Studio (or one of its predecessors, such as Visual C++ or Visual InterDev), then brew tea and possibly attend a morning meeting while it went through its laborious startup. I would keep the IDE open all day as I went through develop/test/debug cycles to avoid another startup delay. When I worked on a C++ project with ~2 million lines of code, I also jump-started each day’s work by automatically running a batch script that did a code checkout and full rebuild of the product in the wee hours.
The startup overhead of Visual Studio has decreased significantly over the years, by the way. It’s now a non-issue even in huge Visual Studio 2022 projects.
Meanwhile, Visual Studio Code usually starts up quickly enough that I can be productive in a few minutes, even for large projects. I said usually, not always: Visual Studio Code itself needs a monthly update, and the many extensions I have installed often need their own updates. Still, even updating a dozen extensions in Visual Studio Code takes much less time than Visual Studio used to take to rebuild the symbol tables of a large C++ project.
Still, choosing between Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio is not as simple as choosing between a lightweight editor and a heavyweight IDE. While Visual Studio Code is highly configurable, Visual Studio is highly complete. Your choice may depend as much on your work style as on the language support and features you need. Let’s take a look at the capabilities and the trade-offs of these two development tools.
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