What Is Microsoft Visual Studio Code Used For
Sofie Kovalcheck
Visual Studio Code is a streamlined code editor with support for development operations like debugging, task running, and version control. It aims to provide just the tools a developer needs for a quick code-build-debug cycle and leaves more complex workflows to fuller featured IDEs, such as Visual Studio IDE.
Important Notice: VS Code gives you the option to install Microsoft and third party extensions. These extensions may be collecting their own usage data and are not controlled by the telemetry.telemetryLevel setting. Consult the specific extension's documentation to learn about its telemetry reporting.
VS Code uses experiments to try out new features or progressively roll them out. Our experimentation framework calls out to a Microsoft-owned service and is therefore disabled when telemetry is disabled. However, if you want to disable experiments regardless of your telemetry preferences, you may set the workbench.enableExperiments user setting to false.
From File > Preferences > Settings, search for telemetry, and set the Telemetry: Telemetry Level setting to off. This will silence all telemetry events including crash reporting from VS Code. You will need to restart VS Code for the setting change to take effect.
Now that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is in effect, we want to take this opportunity to reiterate that we take privacy very seriously. That's both for Microsoft as a company and specifically within the VS Code team.
Beyond crash reporting and telemetry, VS Code uses online services for various other purposes such as downloading product updates, finding, installing, and updating extensions, or providing Natural Language Search within the Settings editor. You can learn more in Managing online services.
You can choose to turn on/off features that use these services. From File > Preferences > Settings, and type the tag @tag:usesOnlineServices. This will display all settings that control the usage of online services and you can individually switch them on or off.
By default, VS Code is set up to auto-update for macOS and Windows users when we release new updates. If you do not want to get automatic updates, you can set the Update: Mode setting from default to none.
Note: On Linux: If the VS Code repository was installed correctly then your system package manager should handle auto-updating in the same way as other packages on the system. See Installing VS Code on Linux.
You can find the VS Code licenses, third party notices and Chromium Open Source credit list under your VS Code installation location resources\app folder. VS Code's ThirdPartyNotices.txt, Chromium's Credits_*.html, and VS Code's English language LICENSE.txt are available under resources\app. Localized versions of LICENSE.txt by language ID are under resources\app\licenses.
The github.com/microsoft/vscode repository (Code - OSS) is where we develop the Visual Studio Code product. Not only do we write code and work on issues there, we also publish our roadmap and monthly iteration and endgame plans. The source code is available to everyone under a standard MIT license.
Microsoft Visual Studio Code is a Microsoft licensed distribution of 'Code - OSS' that includes Microsoft proprietary assets (such as icons) and features (Visual Studio Marketplace integration, small aspects of enabling Remote Development). While these additions make up a very small percentage of the overall distribution code base, it is more accurate to say that Visual Studio Code is "built" on open source, rather than "is" open source, because of these differences. More information on what each distribution includes can be found in the Visual Studio Code and 'Code - OSS' Differences article.
Extension authors are free to choose a license that fits their business needs. While many extension authors have opted to release their source code under an open-source license, some extensions like Wallaby.js, Google Cloud Code, and the VS Code Remote Development extensions use proprietary licenses.
At Microsoft, we open source our extensions whenever possible. However, reliance on existing proprietary source code or libraries, source code that crosses into Microsoft licensed tools or services (for example Visual Studio), and business model differences across the entirety of Microsoft will result in some extensions using a proprietary license. You can find a list of Microsoft contributed Visual Studio Code extensions and their licenses in the Microsoft Extension Licenses article.
Want an early peek at new VS Code features? You can try prerelease versions of VS Code by installing the "Insiders" build. The Insiders build installs side by side to your stable VS Code install and has isolated settings, configurations, and extensions. The Insiders build is updated nightly so you'll get the latest bug fixes and feature updates from the day before.
A VS Code "workspace" is usually just your project root folder. VS Code uses the "workspace" concept in order to scope project configurations such as project-specific settings as well as config files for debugging and tasks. Workspace files are stored at the project root in a .vscode folder. You can also have more than one root folder in a VS Code workspace through a feature called Multi-root workspaces.
For bugs, feature requests or to contact an extension author, you should use the links available in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace or use Help: Report Issue from the Command Palette. However, if there is an issue where an extension does not follow our code of conduct, for example it includes profanity, pornography or presents a risk to the user, then we have an email alias to report the issue. Once the mail is received, our Marketplace team will look into an appropriate course of action, up to and including unpublishing the extension.
VS Code does a background check to detect if the installation has been changed on disk and if so, you will see the text [Unsupported] in the title bar. This is done since some extensions directly modify (patch) the VS Code product in such a way that is semi-permanent (until the next update) and this can cause hard to reproduce issues. We are not trying to block VS Code patching, but we want to raise awareness that patching VS Code means you are running an unsupported version. Reinstalling VS Code will replace the modified files and silence the warning.
You may also see the [Unsupported] message if VS Code files have been mistakenly quarantined or removed by anti-virus software (see issue #94858 for an example). Check your anti-virus software settings and reinstall VS Code to repair the missing files.
When VS Code is launched from a terminal (for example, via code .), it has access to environment settings defined in your .bashrc or .zshrc files. This means features like tasks or debug targets also have access to those settings.
However, when launching from your platform's user interface (for example, the VS Code icon in the macOS dock), you normally are not running in the context of a shell and you don't have access to those environment settings. This means that depending on how you launch VS Code, you may not have the same environment.
To work around this, when launched via a UI gesture, VS Code will start a small process to run (or "resolve") the shell environment defined in your .bashrc or .zshrc files. If, after a configurable timeout (via application.shellEnvironmentResolutionTimeout, defaults to 10 seconds), the shell environment has still not been resolved or resolving failed for any other reason, VS Code will abort the "resolve" process, launch without your shell's environment settings, and you will see an error like the following:
If the error message indicates that resolving your shell environment took too long, the steps below can help you investigate what might be causing slowness. You can also increase the timeout by configuring the application.shellEnvironmentResolutionTimeout setting. But keep in mind that increasing this value means you will have to wait longer to use some of the features in VS Code, such as extensions.
Note: While nvm is a powerful and useful Node.js package manager, it can cause slow shell startup times, if being run during shell initialization. You might consider package manager alternatives such as asdf or search on the internet for nvm performance suggestions.
The Electron shell used by Visual Studio Code has trouble with some GPU (graphics processing unit) hardware acceleration. If VS Code is displaying a blank (empty) main window, you can try disabling GPU acceleration when launching VS Code by adding the Electron --disable-gpu command-line switch.
When you open a folder, VS Code will search for typical project files to offer you additional tooling (for example, the solution picker in the Status bar to open a solution). If you open a folder with lots of files, the search can take a large amount of time and CPU resources during which VS Code might be slow to respond. We plan to improve this in the future but for now you can exclude folders from the explorer via the files.exclude setting and they will not be searched for project files:
Microsoft ended support and is no longer providing security updates for Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1. VS Code desktop versions starting with 1.71 (August 2022) no longer run on Windows 7 and starting with 1.80 (June 2023) will no longer run on Windows 8 and 8.1. You will need to upgrade to a newer Windows version to use later versions of VS Code.
VS Code will no longer provide product updates or security fixes on old Windows versions. VS Code version 1.70.3 is the last available release for Windows 7 users and version 1.79 will be the last available release for Windows 8 and 8.1 users. You can learn more about upgrading your Windows version at support.microsoft.com.
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