Visual Studio Code March 2025 Recovery 3 (version 1.99.3) available

Not forgetting that there's 3 versions for Win - User mode, Admin mode and portable (select the .zip file)..

And VS Code in the browser

You don't need any sort of account to use it. Any extensions that are loaded are up to you, so if you don't want AI ones, you just don't install them.

If you open Settings and search for "update," you can disable updates. I highly recommend that you not do that. Updates are done in the background, and you can choose when to apply them. There are bug fixes in the updates, both to VS Code itself and to the extensions you pick.

@pseymour Oops, I accidentally deleted my question before seeing your reply. Thanks so much for what you've shared. That's reassuring to read. :) I tried to look some at the link from post #2, but it went a bit over my head in terms of figuring out how and what to download. Hubby says I should mention that he's 'old school' and not so young anymore, so that's why he's yearning for things to work like they did 10-20 years ago, which felt more simple, straightforward and kinda cosy for him to work with. He used an older version of the program a bit on his old win7 pc before it went kaput, so he's a little familiar with it, but not fully. He couldn't quite get it to work as he needed it to. He's wanting to try again now that we have this new win11 pro pc for him. Just hoping that newer versions of the program won't be more complicated than it was before.

Edit to add: He's not needing to work in a team and build huge projects, or use big third-party libraries where he doesn't know what's going on in the code. Right now, he's just wanting it to produce non-bloated code... he's hoping to produce some small and efficient exe and dll files. He's not sure if there's any other program that might be more suitable for him, so that's why he was wondering about trying Visual Studio Code again.

If he used it on Windows 7, that was likely Visual Studio, not Visual Studio Code. They have similar names but have nothing to do with each other. VS Code came out right around the same time as Windows 10.

If it is indeed Visual Studio he's remembering, there is a free edition called Visual Studio Community.

@pseymour Ohhhh! Thanks for mentioning that! I'm sure he didn't know about that one (Visual Studio Community). He had to go to bed after a long day of work here (it's late). But I'll let him know when he gets up tomorrow.
(ps -just edited my comment above)

@pseymour I just googled that name (Visual Studio Community). Looks like a microsoft account is required for that (for the free version at least). If he uses one, will that cause any changes on his computer? It's Win 11 Pro and there's only a local account, as we didn't want to create a microsoft account. BitLocker is off also. I don't know if him creating a microsoft account for the program could cause Bitlocker to activate on his pc, or cause his local account to be changed into a microsoft one?

No, the MS account just signs in to Visual Studio. It doesn't enable any other MS-account things in Windows.

You can technically create the projects he wants to create in VS Code, with suitable extensions, but the "old school" Visual Studio is way better in my not-so-humble opinion.

@pseymour I'm sure he's going to be very grateful to hear you said that. Sometimes he despairs a bit over all the modern stuff because it seems to be so complicated, with lots of bloat and stuff he doesn't need or want (like AI). He likes for things to be very simple and straightforward. He was among the first here where we live to ever get a computer as a young child and he had to learn everything from scratch. He reminds me a bit of the great old-timer mechanics I used to have, who preferred the more mechanical cars of years ago, before all the electronics and stuff started being put in them. Because they could dig in under the hood and it wasn't hard or complicated to figure things out and make repairs/adjustments. They knew where they stood with the good oldies, how to get the best performance out of them, keep them tuned up, and right what to do if an issue arose. Kwim? :)

(I should maybe clarify, he's not down on all modern progress. E.g. he does like to use ChatGPT sometimes for some things. He says it's very useful and he appreciates it. He goes to a website for that, I think. It's just that he's not keen on it permeating everything in the OS. He likes for them to be more separate.)

I get what you're saying, for sure. As I've started to replace fancy electronic appliances when they go out, I seek out the old style ones without screens and beep codes and WiFi. Just wash my dirty clothes, please; I don't need a Slack alert when my shirts are dry.

But, code changes faster than cars or washing machines. If he is interested in messing with AI-assisted coding some day, the two best tools right now, to me, are GitHub Copilot and Cursor. The rest are pretty good though. I turned Copilot loose on one of my projects this weekend that has been running for years, no complaints, no bugs I know of. It made all kinds of suggestions that, while they didn't alter the functionality of the code, they made it much better, in terms of readability, maintainability, and simplicity. This meat-based dev was mighty impressed.

pseymour said:

Just wash my dirty clothes, please; I don't need a Slack alert when my shirts are dry.

Click to expand...

lol. Exactly.

It's good to hear what you said about the AI too. I'm sure he'd like to hear more about that kind of stuff, even if he's not quite up for messing around with it himself, because he is impressed with the practical benefits of ChatGPT and he likes to keep learning and studying new things. Just hard to keep up with it all, though, as developments happen so fast nowadays.