Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Visual Studio Code (day 1) (Django, previously Eclipse)

For quite some time, I have been itching to move away from Microsoft solutions. For the last month, I have been learning a whole new technology stack: Linux/Debian, Apache, Django, Python, Eclipse, PuTTY, Google Cloud, MariaDb, Bootstrap, etc.

Each one has such a steep learning curve for me as I have primarily been following Microsoft tools. The biggest challenge for me was Eclipse for several reasons. I did not invest a lot of time into looking into configuring Eclipse to properly work with Django and Python. I used it to edit code to see some variables. I did not have intelli-sense; I could not run the code locally; and the final straw was that I could not remove a warning when I added a static tag to a file. It did not deter the program, but my OCD cannot help but stare at it all the time.

After a couple days of staring at the warning, I did a weak attempt to find a way around it. For me it was a whirlwind of information in that I just decided to search for a new text editor. After a couple of reviews, I saw Visual Studio being used even users on Mac and Linux.

I was very hesitant about going back to Microsoft as I went through all this to avoid them. Eventually, I folded and went to download. At this time, I noticed there was Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. After some research, Visual Studio Code sounded like a text editor than an IDE, so I went ahead with it.

I have to grudgingly say that installing and configuring Visual Studio Code was too easy. I was not only up and running, but also configured to test on my own system prior to uploading to the server. I did run into a small snag. One of the sites I was using as directions provided the commands as "python" instead of "py". I don't know if this was a versioning or aged article issue, but that was quickly remedied.

So far, I have been quite happy with Visual Studio Code.

No comments:

Post a Comment