Today, we are thrilled to announce the general availability of C# Dev Kit, a Visual Studio Code extension that brings an improved editor-first C# development experience to Linux, macOS, and Windows.
A Community Effort – Thank You!
Since our initial preview in June, we have received both quantifiable data and invaluable community feedback that have shaped this product. Approximately 350 issues, primarily reported by our community, have been addressed. These enhancements range from quality improvements to scenario clarifications. Your active engagement has led to over 300 targeted improvements, rendering a more robust and reliable extension. This combined effort was crucial in our decision to transition from preview to general availability and to initiate official support for Visual Studio subscribers.
What is C# Dev Kit?
The C# Dev Kit leverages the core C# language services and delivers additional productivity value to developers. While these core productivity features are now generally available, additional experiences that support .NET MAUI and Unity are still in preview, leveraging the C# Dev Kit. These extensions continue to benefit from feedback and improving your development workflows for MAUI and Unity in VS Code.
What’s Next for C# Dev Kit
Today’s official launch is only the start as we will continue to listen to your feedback and work toward improved performance, reliability, and adding features to support your C# development in VS Code with updates to the extension on a monthly cadence. If you want to get the early bits, opt-in to the pre-release channel where we will insert fixes and previews of new features as they are developed.
Please share your feedback by reporting new issues via VS code or searching the existing enhancement and issues and give your ‘thumbs up’ or additional context to the issue to help us prioritize.
Learn More
If you would like to learn more about C# Dev Kit, you can catch some great sessions coming to Ignite and .NET Conf in November or explore our updated C# VS Code documentation and Get Started docs. Try out the new C# environment with C# Dev Kit today!
Can this be used in neovim?
Its ok if its your only option.
Pros:
* Only free portable option now for Open-Source projects
* It exists
Cons:
* Building an IDE around HTLM/JS/TS was a huge mistake.
* Making users sign into MS accounts is a huge mistake.
* Most serious cross-platform dev is now going to be using Rider as VScode is a massive IDE regression from MonoDevelop.
* Long run this could actually do harm to C# as a language because it now feels like a alien to the IDE and a second class citizen.
* No way to open .sln files without opening folders first...
How do you run tests and get code coverage results using VS code with this extension ?
I’ve pretty much made the transition to using Rider because the support for VS for Mac was horrible and I wasn’t shocked that they discontinued support for it. Basically MS want’s to say they are cross platform but they really only want you using Visual Studio on a PC and this extension is just a half hearted attempt to appease the people that don’t use Windows computers.
If you have a test project in your solution and it has been built, you can find our tests and run them in the Test Explorer Pane in VS Code. You can find more information about the test integration here: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/csharp/testing.
We would love for you to provide feedback through the report issue for things that are missing from your C# Dev Kit experience so that we can improve it.
I don't quite understand some of the criticism. VS Code won over Microsoft independent devs by storm and now is (to my knowledge) the most popular source code editor of all. Being cross platform its target audience was mostly web or script language devs who'd never use Visual Studio or .NET anyways. So coming from that background: Why not open up an improving path for them to code in C#/.NET?
Personally I like VS Code, it's light weight, and I find myself typing "code ." more frequently. So I really like the things Microsoft is doing here and hope...
MAUI which renders using the native UI systems of each platform is not a good way to do a cross platform UI (this idea was bound for failure).
The HTML agnostic rendering code which renders the same across all platforms is much simpler. This is also true for game-engine UI systems. Its far more productive and far less prone to the whims of platform differences.
AvaloniaUI did this correctly using Skia as well. This UI approach for a C# IDE is what should be used IMO.
Hi Andrew,
MAUI which renders using the native UI systems of each platform is not a good way to do a cross platform UI (this idea was bound for failure).
Yes, good point, I agree.
The HTML agnostic rendering code which renders the same across all platforms is much simpler. This is also true for game-engine UI systems. Its far more productive and far less prone to the whims of platform differences.
AvaloniaUI did this correctly using Skia as well. This UI approach for a C# IDE is what should be used IMO.
Avalonia is pretty much what WPF should have evolved into if...
“I’m spoiled by the VS Nuget Manager so I looked for a GUI and found this extension:”
— Nice find. Probably a good solution atm for this part.
Agreed. For some inexplicable reason, Microsoft seems to have decided that anything they build that needs to be cross-platform should be built as some embedded browser based trash. VS Code, Azure Data Studio, the new Outlook, the new Store app - all websites running in an embedded browser. The new Outlook is atrocious.
Why is MS even building MAUI when internally all new dev is being built as websites? Browsers are good for rendering content. Google drove this insane push to make everything a web-based app instead of native, because they have a vested interest in keeping you in the...
Yes, this is the kind of stuff that spoils the whole cross platform story for .NET.
Those of us that were raised in Visual Studio, now have to additionally buy a Rider’s license to get a similar experience outside Windows, regarding all available .NET development workflows.
And what does it say from .NET cross platform capabilities, when the major IDE like offerings rely on Java and JavaScript stacks instead of .NET.
Not trying to be a moron here, but what does it do? Does it let you write C# apps on Linux that run on Linux? Or does it run on Linux so you can write C# apps that will only run on Windows? Does it fully support Windows Forms on Linux yet?
C# already lets you write apps for almost any platform.
This is a vscode IDE extension that makes writing C# apps a little easier.
However vscode makes C# feel like a second class citizen vs older IDEs and I feel like this is only further putting a bad taste in peoples mouths when it comes to C#.
Hi Wendy. I broke out an old Raspberry PI 4, and installed VS Code and .NET 7 today for my kids to play with, which worked perfectly.
Unfortunately I got an error message that Dev Kit and the base C# plugin does not run on that version of ARM, even though I think it is 64 bit. It would be great if Microsoft can also get Dev Kit working on the PI 4 or even just the PI 5 about to come out.
Even though the processor is ARM64, by default the Raspberry Pi Imager will install the 32-bit OS, I’m still new to the whole Raspberry Pi thing though, so I could be wrong. But maybe try installing the 64bit OS?