Visual Studio Code is not Visual Basic Express, nor does it recreate the underlying Microsoft Windows system features and libraries that Visual Basic Express expects. If the school requires Visual Basic Express, then you need to provide your son with a Windows solution on his Mac. Depending on the school's business relationship with Microsoft, they may offer a less expensive, and even potentially, a free version of Windows 10. Inquire.
Your options for running Windows 10 on the 2015 MacBook Pro with El Capitan, are:
- Apple's Boot Camp Assistant (included) with El Capitan in /Applications/Utilities.
- Creates a separate, bootable (not virtualized) partition on the Mac and installs Windows 10 into it
- One can choose to boot into OS X, or Windows 10.
- Apple provides specific drivers for Windows 10 for MacBook Pro hardware compatibility.
- Thoroughly read the above link before plunging into a Boot Camp installation.
- One of three virtual machines to run Windows 10 concurrently as a guest OS with OS X
Oracle's VirtualBox
- Free
- Expects a Windows 10 ISO (.iso) installer
- Parallel's Desktop
- Currently $79/year home/student
- Purchased from Parallels Site
- Parallel's Lite (free) in Mac App Store requires $60/yr in-App purchase to install Windows
- VMware Fusion
- Currently $79
- Purchased from VMware Fusion site
Your son can run any of these solutions on the 2015 MacBook Pro with El Capitan. If it is an 8GB RAM machine, you may want to caution about running any other applications while using the Virtual Machines, or your son may run out of memory. I currently run Windows 10 w/Fall Creator's update in VirtualBox 5.2.6 on a 2011 Mac mini with 16GB RAM.
If you go the VirtualMachine route, I would assign 50 GB - 75 GB of storage to the guest container because of the continuous inundation of bloated Microsoft updates, and additional software (development) installations. The Creators updates are close to 7 GB each. You might let Time Machine back this up the VM guest once, and then in Time Machine Preferences, add the VM directory to the exclusions. Each time you change something in the guest container, Time Machine will back it up, and it is a quick way to exhaust a Time Machine drive.
