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Select a development environment

Select the right development environment to support DevOps adoption and performance. A DevOps development environment should not only edit and debug code, but integrate with the rest of the DevOps cycle, including testing, version control, and production monitoring. Microsoft provides two major development environments to support DevOps, Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

Use Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a full-featured integrated development environment (IDE). If you can use it, Visual Studio is ideal for working in Windows to build software for various platforms, including .NET or .NET Core, iOS, Android via Xamarin, and targets that support C++.

Visual Studio historically offers DevOps productivity and integration benefits. Visual Studio natively integrates with GitHub and Azure DevOps, and has a robust ecosystem of extensions for every industry DevOps provider.

Use Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is a free, streamlined code editor that offers unlimited customization through tens of thousands of commercial and community extensions. These extensions add support for virtually any language, platform, and DevOps service. Developers can be productive on Windows, Mac, or Linux. Visual Studio Code is the ideal option for developers who can't use Visual Studio.

Develop for Azure

There's no particular preferred development environment for Azure solutions. Thanks to broad support for all major application platforms, you can use virtually any tool to build Azure solutions, and select the deployment model that works best for you. The best way to deploy solutions to production is usually through automation hosted in GitHub Actions or Azure Pipelines.

Both Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code have native features and first-party extensions that simplify working with DevOps processes in Azure, GitHub, and Azure DevOps.

Next steps

Learn to prepare Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse for Java, and IntelliJ IDEA for Azure development in the hands-on learning module Prepare your development environment for Azure development.