April 2016

Simple succeeds: Visual Studio Code at 1.0

I have found myself using Microsoft’s new code editor Visual Studio Code more and more these days. It’s a simple and quick alternative to the does everything Visual Studio 2015. Its layout, file handling and keystrokes keep drawing me back to it from VS2015 and even from Notepad++. This is my editor of choice now. Below is an article from InfoWorld on it, with links to Visual Studio Code.

Visual Studio Code, Microsoft’s open source, cross-platform development environment powered by Node.js and the Blink layout engine has been upgraded to a full 1.0 release after approximately a year of open beta testing.

According to a blog post on the Visual Studio site, Code became a 1.0-grade product because its API has been stabilized. Code was originally created for JavaScript and TypeScript development, but it now supports common languages like C++, Python, Go, and React Native.

The runup to 1.0 has been about enhancing Code’s performance and making it into “a great editor for every developer,” including those using non-Western languages — nine languages total are currently supported — and those with visual impairments.

Much of the other work has been dedicated to producing a stable API for the application, so third-party language support going forward will be easier to maintain. Around 1,000 extensions are available for Code, providing themes, support for different languages, and enhancements for libraries in those languages.

The add-ons available for Visual Studio Code 1.0 include support for a plethora of languages, including Go, Python, and many flavors of JavaScript.

A large part of Visual Studio Code’s appeal is that it presents a lightweight, unobtrusive environment, where a developer installs only the items needed for a given job. It’s in sharp contrast to the product’s namesake, Visual Studio, which comes with most everything a developer might need, but is sprawling, complex, and not open source.

The contrasts between the two products are playing out like long-term experiments to see which approach will hold up best over time. Visual Studio is emblematic of Microsoft’s old school and is designed to serve Microsoft users first — though Microsoft has been working to heighten its appeal to newer generations of developers by slimming it down and even offering a functional for-free version. Visual Studio Code is powered as much by open source contributors as it is Microsoft, and it was built for the cross-platform, cross-environment development that Microsoft has admitted it must be part of.

Source: Simple succeeds: Visual Studio Code at 1.0 | InfoWorld

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Microsoft Desktop App Converter Now Available For Download – MSPoweruser

Desktop App Converter tool (Project Centennial) is now available for download from Microsoft. This new tool allows developers to convert their desktop app to a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app. It converts a desktop Windows installer such as MSI or exe to an AppX package that can be deployed to a Windows 10 desktop.

Some of the benefits of converting your classic desktop app.

  • Your app’s installation experience is much smoother for your customers. You can deploy it to computers using sideloading (see Sideload LOB apps in Windows 10), and it leaves no trace behind after being uninstalled. Longer term, you’ll also be able to publish your app to the Windows Store.
  • Because your converted app has package identity, you can call more UWP APIs, even from the full-trust partition, than you could before.
  • At your own pace, you can add UWP features to your app’s package, like a XAML user-interface, live tile updates, UWP background tasks, app services, and many more. All of the functionality available to any other UWP app is available to your app.
  • If you choose to move all of your app’s functionality out of the full-trust partition of the app and into the app container partition, then your app will be able to run on any Windows 10 device.
  • As a UWP app, your app is able to do the things it could do as a classic desktop app. It interacts with a virtualized view of the registry and file system that’s indistinguishable from the actual registry and file system.
  • Your app can participate in the Windows Store’s built-in licensing and automatic update facilities. Automatic update is a highly reliable and efficient mechanism, because only the changed parts of files are downloaded.
  • Download it here from Microsoft. Read the MSDN documentation about this tool here.

Source: Microsoft Desktop App Converter Now Available For Download – MSPoweruser

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