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How to compare the Visual Studio full IDE with Visual Studio Code? If the VS IDE were a high spec campervan, replete with every mod con and comfort to offer good living anywhere, VS Code is the nippy little two door sports car. Pared-down for speed and performance, but with enough optional extras to allow for comfort as well as fun (so, more Porsche than Mazda!).SharePoint development used to need access to the server-side objects, allowing the compiled code to interact directly with the farm. In the newer world of building at the front end, that tight coupling is replaced by remote hosted compiled apps or by client-side code. So Visual Studio no longer needs to run on a SharePoint server.
The lightness of Visual Studio Code is refreshing. It loads quickly on my laptop, and it views my work as files in a series of folders rather than as solutions or projects. Extensions are available in a Marketplace, but for now I am keeping my install lean - after spending time recently investigating a problem in Visual Studio Professional related to a troublesome extension, I am keen to reduce the potential for add-ins to cause me difficulties. The marketplace includes extensions to aid the development workflow, such as tools to check the quality of your code (linters and validators) - but I suggest ignoring these for now. Instead, have a go with the task runners and associated tools from the world of Node. One of the huge benefits is that you'll gain web dev experience applicable beyond the SharePoint "walled garden".
I challenge you to look through the list of extensions you have installed in Visual Studio, and think about which of those you actually use? I know the feeling... "that looks useful, I'll install it and might use it later..."!
Learn the VS Code shortcut keys, and you can quickly be cruising along concentrating on writing good code rather than on nurturing the development environment. The integrated terminal window will soon become very useful in this new world of npm and task runners, so CTRL+` is a good combination to learn straight away.
You can grab VS Code from here - last time I downloaded the setup package, it was about 60MB in size.
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