Many Visual Studio Code features are not exposed through menus or the user interface but can be accessed via the command palette. Unwanted files and folders can be excluded from the project tree via the settings. It supports many programming languages and a set of features that differs per language. This allows it to operate as a language-agnostic code editor for any language.

Instead of a project system, it allows users to open one or more directories, which can then be saved in workspaces for future reuse. Support for additional languages can be provided by freely available extensions on the VS Code Marketplace.

Visual Studio Code also ships with IntelliSense for JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, CSS, and HTML, as well as debugging support for Node.js. This basic support includes syntax highlighting, bracket matching, code folding, and configurable snippets. Out of the box, Visual Studio Code includes basic support for most common programming languages. Visual Studio Code employs the same editor component (codenamed 'Monaco') used in Azure DevOps (formerly called Visual Studio Online and Visual Studio Team Services). It is based on the Electron framework, which is used to develop Node.js web applications that run on the Blink layout engine. Visual Studio Code is a source-code editor that can be used with a variety of programming languages, including Java, JavaScript, Go, Node.js, Python, C++, C, Rust and Fortran. Microsoft has released most of Visual Studio Code's source code on GitHub under the permissive MIT License, while the releases by Microsoft are proprietary freeware. On April 14, 2016, Visual Studio Code graduated from the public preview stage and was released to the Web. On November 18, 2015, the source of Visual Studio Code was released under the MIT License, and made available on GitHub. A preview build was released shortly thereafter. Visual Studio Code was first announced on April 29, 2015, by Microsoft at the 2015 Build conference.

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