Visual Studio Code Extension Samples

This tutorial is the second in a series of three tutorials looking at software development using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code (VS Code). If you don’t yet have VS Code installed, head over to How to Set Up Visual Studio Code. Here, we will look at development using Microsoft’s Arduino Extension. This Extension is for developers who want to develop a Visual Studio Code extension. You can test and play around with all different kinds of UI Elements. Visual studio code offers a wide range of extensions. Here is how to install the extension. Press SHIFT+COMMAND (or Windows)+X or just click on the extension icon of visual studio code. Search for the extension and press install. Here I am listing down the top 15 best visual studio code extensions for web development. The Visual Studio Intellicode is one of the most amazing Visual Studio Code extensions that you can ever use. It is built for helping developers and programmers with smart code completion suggestions and has pre-built support for a wide array of programming languages.

The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code is an open source plug-in for the Visual Studio Code that makes it easier to create, debug, and deploy applications on Amazon Web Services. With the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, you will be able to get started faster and be more productive when building applications with Visual Studio Code on AWS. The toolkit provides an integrated experience for developing serverless applications, including assistance for getting started, step-through debugging, and deploying from the IDE.

The name of the directory for the extension should use the same pattern that when the extension is installed manually. See the source code of this example.

Install Source Code User Guide

Get started fast

Visual Studio Code Extension Samples

Select a quickstart serverless application template.

Visual Studio Code Extension SamplesTop Click to enlarge

Develop serverless applications easily

Set breakpoints and debug serverless applications locally.

Click to enlarge

Deploy from the IDE

Deploy your serverless application in a few clicks.

Click to enlarge

What's new

AWS Senior Developer Advocate James Beswick blogs about how to create, debug, and deploy serverless applications with the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.

Read our announcement post on the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code

As I explained in the post Some implications of the new modular setup of Visual Studio 2017 for VSX developers, Visual Studio 2017 has changed all that you knew about installations of Visual Studio. In this episode of Channel 9, Art Leonard explains to Robert Green the internals of this re-architecture of Visual Studio:

The use of a private registry file causes that if you want to know programmatically the installed editions of Visual Studio 2017, the old approaches don’t work. For example, my article HOWTO: Detect installed Visual Studio editions, packages or service packs is now obsolete.

Fortunately, Microsoft provides a new Setup API to query the installed editions of Visual Studio 2017 or the highest VSIXInstaller.exe, along with sample code and utilities:

Visual Studio Setup Configuration Samples
Microsoft/vs-setup-samples
“This is a sample in various programming languages that demonstrates how developers can use the new Visual Studio setup query API. The included samples show how to use the new setup configuration API for discovering instances of Visual Studio 2017”.

Visual Studio Locator
Microsoft/vswhere
“Over the years Visual Studio could be discovered using registry keys, but with recent changes to the deployment and extensibility models a new method is needed to discover possibly more than once installed instance. These changes facilitate a smaller, faster default install complimented by on-demand install of other workloads and components. vswhere is designed to be a redistributable, single-file executable that can be used in build or deployment scripts to find where Visual Studio – or other products in the Visual Studio family – is located.”

Visual Studio Code Best Extensions

Visual Studio Setup PowerShell Module
Microsoft/vssetup.powershell
“This PowerShell module contains cmdlets to query instances of Visual Studio 2017 and newer. It also serves as a more useful sample of using the Setup Configuration APIs than the previously published samples though those also have samples using VB and VC++.”

Visual Studio Code Extension Download

VSIX Installer Bootstrapper
Microsoft/vsixbootstrapper
“An installer that can be chained with other packages to locate the latest VSIXInstaller.exe to use for installing VSIX extensions. One of the great new features of Visual Studio 2017 is an initial smaller and fast install. To compliment a smaller – but powerful – initial feature set, installing additional workloads and components on-demand is supported for both end users and package developers. Package developers can install their VSIX extensions for Visual Studio using this bootstrapper to find the latest version of VSIXInstaller.exe and install their extension(s). This may be preferable for extensions that support Visual Studio 2017 or newer than installing extensions in Windows Installer .msi packages, since MSIs cannot run concurrently in separate processes. Other deployments may also benefit since they no longer have to find where VSIXInstaller.exe is installed. The command line passed to VSIXBootstrapper.exe is passed through to VSIXInstaller.exe.”