Visual Studio For Mac

Todd Baker I'm not really certain of the differences, but Visual Studio Code is a very reputable software, I've used it on Mac and PC and have not noticed any differences. I'd be surprised if they excluded any major functionality between versions. The video could also be an older video that may be using an old version of VS Code so that may be why you're noticing a difference, and if that's the case, then you should have a more updated version. I would not worry about any disadvantage.

Todd, go to VS Code> help> tips & tricks

Hi all!

I just came across this post and had a peek at the comments below it. Just so any future readers don't get confused, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), and Visual Studio (VS) are not one and the same. VS Code is an open source text editor (a very good one, in my humble opinion), whereas Visual Studio is a licensed Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Both are offered by Microsoft, but are certainly not the same.

If you are wondering what are the differences between a text editor and an IDE, you can get a full appreciation of all of the features a good IDE would offer you by watching the first video in this course - as you will see, a text editor is only one of a number of features a full IDE would offer you. It is worth saying that some of the features of the VS IDE described in this video, such as a debugger and a version control GUI, are also available in VS Code. But for the most part, there is a world of difference in terms of what an IDE like VS can offer you versus a text editor like VS Code.

Personally, I use both. VS Code on a MacBook Pro, at present primarily for JavaScript and React projects, and Visual Studio (the IDE) on my Windows machine, primarily for C# projects.

As for the original question by the OP - there are most certainly differences between Visual Studio Community, and Visual Studio for Mac. VS for Mac does NOT come with many of the features that VS Community users have at their disposal - you can see the side-by-side comparison of both versions of VS, here: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/mac/

As an aside, there are also multiple editions of Visual Studio itself - 'Community' (the edition discussed in this course), 'Professional', and 'Enterprise'. The main difference between all three editions is that of licensing, and this is also briefly discussed in the course - in short, if you are only using VS as a Treehouse student you should be OK with the community edition, but please read the licensing terms on the Microsoft website to see if your usage falls within their licensing limitations.

In regards to a difference in features between different editions of VS (not including the 'for Mac' version which I have addressed above separately), there is very little difference in terms of features between Community and Professional editions. Although there are indeed subtle differences, the main difference is that of licensing. It is when you look at the Enterprise edition that you see a larger difference in their respective feature sets. For a side by side comparison of the three different editions, visit the following link; https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/compare/

Hope this helps! :)

John Butcher - Thanks for your thorough explanation. I use Mac and Windows both for what I do (same as you - I use VS Code for my Front end dev) and I was wondering how different a lot of the features were on VS IDE for windows since I only downloaded VS for Mac. It has been a good while since I used Visual Studio IDE but I have used Eclipse and NetBeans for Java quite a bit and assume I am going to find similar functionality. I was also wondering how much of the difference I was seeing in what Jeremy was teaching was due to fact that this video workshop is several years old or the fact that I had the mac version. I was going to go googling to see but you answered a lot of what I needed. Thanks again for taking the time to explain all of that.