During the Connect(); 2015 developer event that took place on November 18, 2015, in New York City, USA, Microsoft had the great pleasure of announcing that its Visual Studio Code integrated development environment software is now open source.

Immediately after the huge announcement, Microsoft published the Visual Code Studio sources on the GitHub project hosting website, urging the community to contribute to the development of the software in any way they can. "You spoke and we listened. With this release, VS Code development is now open source on GitHub," said Microsoft.

The cross-platform web and cloud development code editor (IDE) is now distributed for free as an open-source application on GitHub, licensed under the MIT license for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and, of course, Microsoft Windows.

The latest available release at the moment of writing this article is version 0.10.1, but Microsoft announced that it put the software in Beta and declared it "the most significant release since the launch." Just by looking at the release notes, we can indeed notice that Visual Studio Code Beta is a massive update with numerous new features.

Among the most important ones, we can mention support for TextMate snippets, debug console improvements, easy variable selection, debug environment configuration, node.js debugging, improved debug hover behavior, enhanced syntax highlighting, environment variable substitution, and new difference view settings.