Visual Studio Code 2015 Release: Redefining Developer Workflows

Visual Studio Code is the dominant development environment (IDE) today. In most developer surveys about which IDE people use, VS Code ranks first by a wide margin.

On April 29, 2015, Microsoft introduced Visual Studio Code at the Build conference, and a preview version was released the same day. The stable release of Visual Studio Code followed on November 18, 2015.

Visual Studio Code is distributed under one of the most permissive software licenses — the MIT License. It allows developers to use the source code in their own products, even closed-source ones. This led to the emergence of several popular forks, with one of the most notable being Cursor — an IDE designed for working with large language models.

Despite the name, Visual Studio Code is not actually related to Microsoft Visual Studio in terms of codebase. It does not include Visual Studio components, is not a “lightweight” version of it, and the only things they share are the name and being part of the Microsoft ecosystem.

See also The Launch of Visual Studio 97: Microsoft’s Developer Revolution in 1997.