Tag Archives: visual studio code

software development, tech, visual studio

Stack Overflow survey shows leap in popularity for Visual Studio Code

Stack Overflow has released the results of its annual developer survey. I took a quick look, comparing the figures to those for 2018.

The survey is based on results from 88,883 developers from 179 countries. 400 responses were excluded because they took less than 3 minutes to complete!

A few things caught my eye.

Visual Studio Code is the most popular development tool, with over 50% of developers saying they use it. This is up from 34.9% last year. Visual Studio (which I guess includes Visual Studio for Mac) is second but has gone down from 34.3% to 31.5%.

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Visual Studio Code is an amazing success; it is only four years old. What is the benefit to Microsoft though? There must be some benefit via the branding and gentle steers towards Microsoft services such as Azure; but this is mainly about Microsoft delivering a great free and open source developer tool and getting kudos in return.

Few other technologies have moved by such a dramatic amount. JavaScript remains top in languages but slightly down, 69.8% to 67.8%. Python is gently up, 38.8% to 41.7%. C# slightly down, 34.4% to 31%. Swift is down a bit, 8.1% to 6.6%, which is a little surprising to me.

TypeScript is up from 17.4% to 21.2%. Another impressive open source project from Microsoft and the great Anders Hejlsberg (Object Pascal, Delphi, C#, TypeScript).

In frameworks, last year StackOverflow had a single category for .NET Core (27.2%) while ignoring .NET Framework. This year it has 23.7% for .NET Core and 37.4% for .NET – no trends are therefore visible but next year perhaps.

There is an overly broad platform category including everything from Raspberry Pi to WordPress to AWS. I do not have much confidence in these figures, but notice that AWS is up from 24.1% to 29.5%, Google Cloud Platform up from 8% to 12.8%, and Azure up from 11% to  11.9%. Not good figures for Azure, now third behind AWS and Google. But Microsoft can take comfort from Windows, supposedly up from 35.4% to 50.7%.

Both Android (29% to 27%) and iOS (15.5% to 13%) are down slightly. I do not think this is meaningful movement but it does suggest that mobile app development is not longer a big growth area; perhaps there is more attention being paid to server apps.

software development, tech

Adding a Visual Studio code workspace to a GitHub repository

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Rather to my surprise, I am currently spending more of my development time in Visual Studio Code than in Visual Studio. There are a few reasons:

– I am working on a Java project and chose to use VS Code in part as a learning exercise

– I have a PHP website and have worked out a nice debugging environment using VS Code and WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

– I am finding VS Code handy as a general-purpose editor

How about source control though? I guess as you would expect from Microsoft (which now owns GitHub) the git support is built in. So this is how I moved my PHP website, which was not under source control, to a private GitHub repository:

1. In VS Code, open the workspace and press Ctrl-Shift-G or click the Source control icon. Click the repository icon for Initialize Repository:

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Then select your workspace from the dropdown and the local repository is created.

Initially all your files are in an unstaged state. Staging in git is where you define which changes will be committed in your next commit. We want to commit everything to form the initial repo, so drop down the git menu (three dots to the right of the source control pane) and choose Commit all, click Yes.

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Type a commit message and go.

Now go to GitHub and create a new repository.

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This is a private repository as nobody else needs to see the code for my website.

The repository is created, and right there on the default help page is the command for pushing your existing repo to GitHub.

Just open a terminal and paste the command:

git remote add origin https://github.com/[your repo name]

git push -u origin master

After the second command you will be prompted to login to GitHub. This creates an access token.

Done! If you go back to the repo on GitHub you will find it populated with your files.

A similar workflow applies if you use Azure DevOps. The choice is yours; the features of the two services are different but if all you want is source code management GitHub seems the obvious choice.

gadgets, google, linux, microsoft, tech

Linux applications and .NET Core on a Chromebook makes this an increasingly interesting device

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I have been writing about Google Chromebooks of late and as part of my research went out and bought one, an HP Chromebook 14 that cost me less than £200. It runs an Intel Celeron N3350 processor and has a generous (at this price) 32GB storage; many of the cheaper models have only 16GB.

This is a low-end notebook for sure, but still boots quickly and works fine for general web browsing and productivity applications. Chrome OS (the proprietary version of the open source Chromium OS) is no longer an OS that essentially just runs Google’s Chrome browser, though that is still the main intent. It has for some time been able to run Android applications; these run in a container which itself runs Android. Android apps run fairly well though I have experienced some anomalies.

Recently Google has added support for Linux applications, though this is still in beta. The main motivation for this seems to be to run Android Studio, so that Googlers and others with smart Pixelbooks (high-end Chromebooks that cost between £999 and £1,699) can do a bit more with their expensive hardware.

I had not realised that even a lowly HP Chromebook 14 is now supported by the beta, but when I saw the option in settings I jumped at it.

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It took a little while to download but then I was able to open a Linux terminal. Like Android, Linux runs in a container. It is also worth noting that Chrome OS itself is based on Linux so in one sense Chromebooks have always run Linux; however they have been locked down so that you could not, until now, install applications other than web apps or Android.

Linux is therefore sandboxed. It is configured so that you do not have access to the general file system. However the Chromebook Files application has access to your user files in both Chrome OS and Linux.

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I found little documentation for running Linux applications so here are a few notes on my initial stumblings.

First, note that the Chromebook trackpad has no right-click. To right-click you do Alt-Click. Useful, because this is how you paste from the clipboard into the Linux terminal.

Similarly, there is no Delete key. To Delete you do Alt-Backspace.

I attribute these annoyances to the fact that Chrome OS was mostly developed by Mac users.

Second, no Linux desktop is installed. I did in fact install the lightweight LXDE with partial success but it does not work properly.

The idea is that you install GUI applications which run in their own window. It is integrated so that once installed, Linux applications appear in the Chromebook application menu.

I installed Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release).  Then I installed an application which promises to be particularly useful for me, Visual Studio Code. Next I installed the .NET Core SDK, following the instructions for Debian.

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Everything worked, and after installing the C# extension for VS Code I am able to debug and run .NET Core applications.

I understand that you will not be so lucky with VS Code if you have an ARM Chromebook. Intel x86 is the winner for compatibility.

What is significant to me is not only that you can now run desktop applications on a Chromebook, but also that you can work on a Chromebook without needing to be deeply hooked into the Google ecosystem. You still need a Google account of course, for log in and the Play Store.

You will also note from the screenshot above that Chrome OS is no longer just about a full-screen web browser. Multiple overlapping windows, just like Windows and Mac.

These changes might persuade me to spend a little more on a Chromebook next time around. Certainly the long battery life is attractive. Following a tip, I disabled Bluetooth, and my Chromebook battery app is reporting 48% remaining, 9 hrs 23 minutes. A little optimistic I suspect, but still fantastic.

Postscript: I was always a fan of the disliked Windows RT, which combined a locked-down operating system with the ability to run Windows applications. Maybe container technology is the answer to the conundrum of how to provide a fully capable operating system that is also protected from malware. Having said which, there is no doubt that these changes make Chromebooks more vulnerable to malware; even if it only runs in the Linux environment, it could be damaging and steal data. The OS itself though will be protected.