What is Visual Studio?

The Visual Studio IDE is modelled after its predecessors Visual C++ and Visual Basic application, and was first deployed in 1997 by Microsoft. It is one of the leading IDEs available to developers looking to develop applications across platforms (for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux) with interesting and unique features like extensive tooling, cloud services via Microsoft Azure integration, Intellisense, debugging and profiling, and much more.

Note: IntelliSense is a code-completion aid that includes several features such as List Members, Parameter Info, Quick Info, and Complete Word.

These are the core functionalities provided by Microsoft in the Visual Studio IDE:

• Develop: You can code quickly and accurately with the IntelliSense and IntelliCode features.
• Debug: All Visual Studio products are equipped with an integrated debugging tool, it also allows you to visually step through the code look at the values stored in the variables, and examine every single aspect of your code path.
• Test: You can analyze and test your code instantly with the testing suite and the WSL integration allows testing on both Windows and Linux.
• Collaborate via LiveShare: This feature aids in real-time collaboration so multiple members of a team can work on a block of code simultaneously to speed up the entire process and maintain consistency.
• Deploy: Azure-based deployment in Visual Studio allows deployment by employing dependencies, like Azure SQL database and Azure storage so your project can be easily deployed into the cloud.
• Design: As a developer, you can build a multi-faceted, rich, cross-platform app by employing Visual Studio and using technologies like WinUI, MAUI, WPF, etc. Visual Studio also aids in quick changes to the design of your application by using visualization and modeling.
• Profiling: Building responsive .NET, C#, and C++ applications is also simplified due to the extensive range of profiling tools available in Visual Studio such as profilers for XAML, databases, CPU, events, memory, and so on.
• Data-handling: Visual Studio is also equipped with special tools to make SQL projects and database functioning simpler with rich editors, database schemas visualizer, and query support.

Another exciting feature is the: Github Co-pilot collaborated with Visual Studio 2024. It acts as the AI programmer, that provides Git support and works as a teammate, i.e. your co-pilot, to remove blocks in your task-flow and allows you to work seamlessly, faster, and more efficiently.

The overlap of confusion caused amongst the developer community – especially for those individuals who are new to it – about the difference between Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code (let us refer to it as VSCode to avoid ambiguity) is something of a rite of passage.

The confusion is well placed as both the products have a great many similarities. For starters, they are both developed by Microsoft, they are both used to develop code and the most misleading similarity of them all is their names. But regardless of how similar they seem, they are not the same.

However, before we can get into the differences between the two, one distinction needs to be made clear: Text-Editor vs. IDE.