Check out Visual Studio Code – a free text editor from Microsoft

20 April 2016

Check out Visual Studio Code – a free text editor from Microsoft

Corona developers are always looking for new tools to help improve their workflow.

Many people have heard about Microsoft Visual Studio, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for building Microsoft applications, whether it be for Windows desktop or Windows Phone.

To be clear, Visual Studio Code — the topic of this announcement — is not the same thing as Visual Studio. Rather, it’s a text editor born from the full Visual Studio IDE. Why is this important? Two reasons:

1. It runs on OS X

While the full Visual Studio IDE is a Windows-based tool, Visual Studio Code has a native version for OS X. If you’re comfortable with the IDE in Windows, you’ll feel right at home when working in OS X.

2. It supports Corona SDK

Code highlighting is part of the standard Visual Studio Code editor, and an optional extension called Corona Tools brings Corona’s documentation to the editor. Installing the extension gives you keyboard shortcuts to either open or search Corona Labs’ documentation. While this is currently a new extension with limited functionality, feel free to reach out to the developer, Tobiah Zarlez, to request additional features.

In summary

We love seeing new third-party tools being developed for Corona SDK. If you would like to see one featured on our Third-Party Tools and Services page, please let us know in the Corona forums.