Study of Visual Studio Code Practical Course — Contributing to an Open-Source Project

VSCode started off as a project called Monaco in 2011 with the vision of developing a code editor that could be run in the browser. For this, Microsoft decided to hire Erich Gamma as team lead, a well-known computer scientist who was also involved in the development of Eclipse [1]. Monaco was first launched to clients of the Microsoft Azure cloud enabling them to edit websites directly in the browser [2]. To make Monaco more appealing, the development team decided to switch from a web-only editor to a standalone desktop application. To achieve this, they made use of node-webkit (later called electron [3]), that allowed the team to pack and deploy JavaScript applications as native desktop apps. With this transition, Monaco became the underlying code editor that powers VSCode [1]. After this pivot, VSCode was first announced to the public in May 2015, the source code open-sourced in November 2015 and version 1.0 released in April 2016 [4]. Since then, VSCode has been continuously developed in terms of stability and functionality. As of writing, the current version is 1.51 which naturally supports a lot more features than the initial release (e.g. WSL integration, workbenches, attached debugger . . .) which are listed at [5]. It is worth noting that, as the goal is to keep the editor lightweight and bloat-free, the core team develops many of the new features in the form of plugins (e.g. the latest GitHub integration). As VSCode is a dynamic open-source project, the future is uncertain. Two things the development team currently focuses on are: 1) Going back to the roots and making Visual Studio Code again available in the browser. 2) Adding support for workbenches in various programming languages that combine code and markdown text to create shareable and most importantly interactive projects [1] (similar to Project Jupyter [6]).