Visual Studio Vs Visual Studio Code?
I wrote the first book on Windows and used Visual Studio Community Edition 2017 (VS). For Linux I’m using Visual Studio Code (VSC) but if you are working on Windows you have the choice. So which is better suited to you?
Given that my full time job involved Visual Studio Professional, it wasn’t a difficult choice for me, though having used VSC on Linux, I’m now warming to it.
I found the configuration messy but if you stick at it, you get there. It’s a fairly simple product but once you get into all the configuration and extensions, there’s a lot more to it.
VS (now at 2019 version) is an excellent tool and the navigation features and debugging are better than VSC. You can also view disassembly of C code as the screenshot shows.
But if you are also working on Linux or Mac and using VSC, it might be easier or at least more consistent using it for all platforms. Mind you there’s also the question of MSVC vs Clang to sort as well.
VS has extensions but only 3271 currently compared to 16934 for VSC and many of the VS extensions are trial while it appears that all of VSC are free. There’s also nearly ten times as many programming language extensions for VSC (3427) compared to VS (351).
So there’s no outright clear winner here. YMMV as the saying goes. (Your mileage may vary). Here for your delectation is that disassembly including the original C lines. Don’t worry, I won’t publish too many of these!
int main()
{
00E31700 push ebp
00E31701 mov ebp,esp
00E31703 sub esp,0CCh
00E31709 push ebx
00E3170A push esi
00E3170B push edi
00E3170C lea edi,[ebp-0CCh]
00E31712 mov ecx,33h
00E31717 mov eax,0CCCCCCCCh
00E3171C rep stos dword ptr es:[edi]
00E3171E mov ecx,offset _1EF31893_ods@c (0E3C00Ch)
00E31723 call @__CheckForDebuggerJustMyCode@4 (0E3120Dh)
wchar_t * text=L"Hello World!\n";
00E31728 mov dword ptr [text],offset string L"Hello World!\n" (0E37B30h)
OutputDebugString(text);
00E3172F mov esi,esp
00E31731 mov eax,dword ptr [text]
00E31734 push eax
00E31735 call dword ptr [__imp__OutputDebugStringW@4 (0E3B000h)]
00E3173B cmp esi,esp
00E3173D call __RTC_CheckEsp (0E31217h)
}
00E31742 xor eax,eax
00E31744 pop edi
00E31745 pop esi
00E31746 pop ebx
00E31747 add esp,0CCh
00E3174D cmp ebp,esp
00E3174F call __RTC_CheckEsp (0E31217h)
00E31754 mov esp,ebp
00E31756 pop ebp
00E31757 ret 
In the post about rsyslog three days ago, I explained how to log from Linux programs using the rsyslog daemon.
Just run DebugView and leave it there. It might catch other stuff from Windows, but when you run your program from the command line or double click on it, it will execute quickly and you’ll see any strings captured like this one.