In the first chapter of my debugging book, I discuss IDE debugging. In that chapter, I mostly talk about IntelliJ/IDEA. People often ask me why I didn’t write as much about VS Code…The reason is that there isn’t much to write about. Its debugger is simpler for better and for worse. It isn’t as powerful as other IDEs. I created the following video that covers the content of this post:
This isn’t a slam against VS Code or against Microsoft. Visual Studio has one of the most powerful debuggers around. But, Visual Studio Code doesn’t have a lot of the features from Visual Studio or other IDEs. I think this is intentional. I think this is a user experience-driven decision in which they removed features to simplify usability. One thing VS Code did well was exposing the log point (tracepoint) feature, so it is more discoverable to the casual developer. That’s pretty great and wouldn’t have been practical if the IDE had all the salient features.