I thought you left. HIVE is a very tough market for newbies.
The Powers-That-Be just issued a new white paper for the platform. My guess is that they are actually looking for new ideas for the platform after the breakup with SteemIt. SteemIt is undergoing a similar revision. Except I suspect their code will be controlled by The Tron Foundation.
If you read the whitepaper; you will find that they actually have a large pool of HBD reserved for developers. I think they keep the money for developers in 
The way they do projects is people write up proposals and the community votes on the proposals. Here is an announcement for the new whitepaper.
@guiltyparties/hive-whitepaper
I tried Visual Studio a long time ago. I seriously disliked it. I pretty much stopped using IDEs in favor of text editors. The IDEs seem to want people to build unnecessary dependencies into their code.
RE: Visual Studio Code