Visual Studio Code (or VS Code for short) is a lightweight code editor and debugging tool, that derives from the familiar features and look and feel of Visual Studio. It was first released in April 2015 and has since evolved to a stable 1.x release. It evolves consistently and constantly, and since it's open source, the source codes can be viewed on GitHub at https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode.
The thinking behind VS Code is that while Visual Studio, the real version of development tooling on the Windows platform, evolves quite slowly, VS Code could evolve on a monthly basis. Thus, it's much more lightweight and also cross-platform, as it was written using the Electron Framework. Installation takes just a minute or two. Compare this to Visual Studio 2017 installation, which often takes an hour depending on the features chosen.
VS Code is cross-platform, and it runs natively on Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms.
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