Visual Studio Code, shortened VSCode, is a source code editor by Microsoft. Released in April 2015, it has since enjoyed a surge of popularity among developpers.
First, let's get something out of the way: Visual Studio Code is not Visual Studio. The latter is a much older source code editor, also by Microsoft. Whereas Visual Studio Code is cross-platform, open source and relatively lightweight, Visual Studio is closed source, Mac & Windows only, and quite the beast.
For the upcoming lessons we highly encourage the use of VSCode instead of Atom.