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