Microsoft Cozies Up to Linux Developers with Visual Studio Changes
In its latest gesture of goodwill toward the Linux and open source community, Microsoft (MSFT) has announced that its Visual Studio Code editor has become open source, among other Linux-friendly updates to the company's products.
In its latest gesture of goodwill toward the Linux and open source community, Microsoft (MSFT) has announced that its Visual Studio Code editor has become open source, among other Linux-friendly updates to the company’s products.
Visual Studio Code is a cross-platform app for editing source code. Although it previously worked on Linux, its source code was closed. Now, Microsoft is placing the full source on GitHub for anyone to access it.
Importantly, this move does not appear to be the result of Microsoft’s loss of interest in Visual Studio Code. The company has also announced new features in the app, signaling that it intends to continue developing it, not set it adrift in the open source sea.
Relatedly, Microsoft also announced a new extension in its core Visual Studio product — which is a complete integrated development environment (IDE), not just a code editor like Visual Studio Code — that will allow users of the platform to debug code running on remote Linux systems using the GNU Debugger (GDB).
That’s significant because Visual Studio itself does not run on Linux. As a result, using the IDE to develop Linux applications was previously difficult for programmers. Although the program still doesn’t work on Linux, the GDB extension makes it easier to write code for Linux-based platforms — including not just desktops and servers but also IoT devices — from Windows.
We used to think Microsoft’s newfound endorsement of the open source world wasn’t actually as momentous as people seemed to think when the company began warming up to Linux earlier this year. But we’re reevaluating that assessment.
