As VS Code Gains in Popularity, Microsoft Praises 'Inner Source' Development

It's been estimated that there are 24 million developers in the world. 14 million of them now use Microsoft's Visual Studio Code (VS Code) as their IDE, reports ZDNet, with five million new users arriving in 2020.

Julia Liuson, corporate vice president of Microsoft's developer division, tells them why:
'The strategy for VS Code is really to support our any, any, any strategy. You can be a developer working with any programming language, working on any operating system and develop any kind of software.' VS Code runs on macOS, Windows 10, and multiple distributions of Linux, it supports Arm64 on Linux, and runs on Raspberry Pi and Chromebooks. It's also available in preview form

Part of VS Code's popularity is the breadth of language extensions for C++, C#, Python and various Python libraries for data scientists, Java, and JavaScript/Typescript... 'We have almost two million Python developers using VS Code and well over a million C++ developers using VS Code,' said Liuson. 'And even our Java usage is approaching one million....'

Liuson also talked about Microsoft's inner source approach to software development. The company doubled down on inner source in 2019, and recently highlighted its inner-source approach as a factor that mitigated the threat of the SolarWinds hackers accessing its source code. Microsoft didn't make up the term inner source and the approach means taking open-source development practices and applying them inside a single organization. GitHub and GitHub's Enterprise Server fits snuggly with this approach to help organizations collaborate but do so in private.

'Inner source means if you have private IP, but you're inviting other teams within the company to collaborate with you. That's the fundamental difference between open source and inner source. Today, it's very common in large enterprise...'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.