With previous SharePoint frameworks, such as in the add-in model and the full-trust models, a developer would use Visual Studio to build and package everything in the project. As the code editor, this would often be a version released around the same time as the SharePoint version, such as Visual Studio 2013 together with SharePoint 2013.
For the SharePoint Framework, Microsoft envisioned that as things evolve rapidly and open source frameworks shift constantly, then the main development environment does not follow the pace set by Visual Studio. Visual Studio Code is a free, open source alternative to Visual Studio commercial editions from Microsoft, and it is the preferred integrated development environment for SharePoint Framework based projects.
Compared to a full and commercial version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code (or VS Code for short) is lightweight and quick to install. You can download the latest version of VS Code at https://code.visualstudio.com/,...