We are entering the last week of the calendar, and we are also reaching the end of the book. Today is time to look at the cross-platform tools used to develop ASP.NET Core application on any platform. We'll have a look at Visual Studio Code, and specifically how the C# integration works.

Visual Studio Code is just a simple text editor, with no language-specific features or knowledge. All language-specific tools are coming as external extensions, either developed by Microsoft or by the community.

So how can Visual Studio Code show Intellisense when you type .NET code, or provide refactoring suggestions or show compilation errors in real time? This is done using Omnisharp. Here is an extract from chapter 8 of book, which briefly explains what Omnisharp is.

All these features, as far as their support for .NET Core is concerned, are possible thanks to OmniSharp. OmniSharp is a set of OSS projects that work together for bringing .NET development to any text editor.

The base layer is a server that runs Roslyn and analyzes the files of the project that is open inside the editor.

On top of this there is an API (REST-based over HTTP or over pipes) that allows clients (text editors via their extensions) to query the code model to get intellisense, parameter information, the references to a variable, or the definition of a method. At the top layer are all the editor-specific extensions that display the information retrieved from the OmniSharp server in a user-friendly way. The top layer also includes other features that are purely client-side such as code formatting or snippet expansion. It is also the extensions that interact with the debugger to provide all the features needed for debugging your code.

OmniSharp extensions have been developed for the most popular text editors on the market. Apart from Visual Studio Code, there are extensions for Atom, Vim, Sublime, and even Emacs. This means that you can continue using your favorite text editor and still be able to get all the benefit of a rich code-editing experience powered by OmniSharp.

This article was short summary of the chapter about deploying ASP.NET Core from my upcoming book "Front-end Development with ASP.NET Core, Angular, and Bootstrap"

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