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.
Building a cross-platform development Tool using JavaScript
Erich Gamma
Distinguished Engineer - Microsoft
After spending many years as a Java developer Erich Gamma (Design Patterns, JUnit, Eclipse Java Tools, Rational Team Concert) jumped ship and joined Microsoft in 2011 as a Distinguished Engineer. He and his team work out of a small Microsoft development lab in Zurich. They work on components for on-line coding leveraging HTML5 technologies. You can see these components in action in several Microsoft products, like Team Foundation Server, the Azure portal, OneDrive, the TypeScript playground, and most recently Visual Studio Code.