Years ago developing on the MS plaform was  an exclusive activity. First you needed a version of Visual Studio to write code and compile it. That alone ran about 2500 per year. At the time MS had a licesning agreement that gave them rights to all code compiled using VS. It was and elitist club indeed. So what happened? Like capitalism tends to do, people were driven to innovation to free themselves from code tyranny. Hence Mono arrived on the scene. Mono is a compiler that works with MS languages thus removing some of the licensing shackles. Mono is well adapted and deployed across the globe to the point that it had an affect on Visual Studio users. After all to write the code all that is need is a text editor. To keep its relevnace, MS put out Express version of Visual Studio to keep the developer head count steady. So, at this point any application can be developed on Visual Studio or Visual Code without giving God Father Gates his cut. So what happened to Visual Studio? Market forces happened to it. The developer world wants to creat. Not be schackled by licenses.