The story of Visual Studio (that no one asked for)

Alex Brown — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 16:53:53 +0000

Shared from yesterday's issue of our Bytes Newsletter. Check it out if you like nice things.

Visual Studio is about to turn 25, and like many of us, it was a late bloomer.

Back in 1997, it started out as a collection of three separate IDE's for Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual FoxPro (no relation to Starfox, I checked). And they all came on separate CD's, which you had to buy from a store 🤮. In the '90s, "stealing software" meant setting up a heist at your local Circuit City like Mark Wahlberg in The Italian Job. It's called The Dark Ages™️ for a reason.

In 2002, we got Visual Studio .NET edition, which came with a brand new programming language called C#. That fun little bonus feature was created by Anders Hejlsberg, who went on to create TypeScript a decade later 🐐.

And so it went for the next ~18 years. Along the way, Visual Studio was able to ditch the CD's, but the software itself remained pretty bloated and relatively unpopular. VS finally got its ✨glow-up✨ in 2015 when it came out with VS*Code* -- the powerful text editor we all know and (mostly) love, with TypeScript as the key ingredient.

Fast forward to today, and VSCode is used by over 70% of web developers and literally writes our code for us now. The Visual Studio IDE is still around too, but it's mostly used by .NET developers to do whatever it is they do.

Bottom Line: None of this is that relevant to me personally, since I write all my code in the Apple Notes app right after I finish sketching it out on a whiteboard -- but I guess it's cool if you're into text editors.

DEV Community: Alex Brown

The story of Visual Studio (that no one asked for)