Microsoft recently announced Visual Studio Code a new choice of developer tool that combines the simplicity of a code editor with the best of what developers need for their core code-edit-debug cycle. Under the covers Visual Studio Code is a JavaScript application. We started the journey four years ago developing components for writing code inside a browser using plain JavaScript. Along the way our code base became one of the largest TypeScript code bases. Eventually, we let the components run as normal desktop applications building on GitHub's Electron framework. Finally, the architecture evolved towards a tools service architecture which enables rich code analysis for C# and TypeScript. In this talk I'll look back on this fun journey and describe what practices have worked for us to ship such an application.
