The notes from my session "Authoring in VS Code" at the 2017 PowerShell and DevOps Global Summit in Bellevue, WA.

VSCodeDeepDive.md

Visual Studio Code Deep Dive

David Wilson - @daviwil Software Engineer, PowerShell Team

Overview

1. Visual Studio Code overview
2. Configuring the editor
3. Extensions
4. PowerShell support

Overview

Command Palette

• Launch with Ctrl+Shift+P or F1
• Interactive search of all commands as you type
• Key bindings are listed to the right
• Some commands give you more menus, like "File: Open Recent"
• Ctrl+P to get the file switcher
• Ctrl+Shift+O lets you navigate between symbols in the open file

Folder browser

• A folder is treated as a workspace
• Difference between having a folder open or not
• Biggest difference is task and debugger configurations
• Folders allow workspace-specific settings
• Source control (Git) is activated

Source Control

Git

If your workspace folder has a .git folder, you get a great Git experience out of the box.

• Diffing
• Staging files
• Committing
• Pushing commits
• Pulling from remotes
• Creating and switching branches

Try out GitLens for even more good stuff!

Other VCS'es should be supported soon, new SCM APIs in VS Code 1.11.

Panels

• Problems
• Output
• Debug Console
• Terminal

Integrated Terminal

• SUPER FAST
• Supports any shell!
  • PowerShell with PSReadline
  • Bash for Windows
  • Anything on Linux or macOS: zsh, fish, etc

Tasks

• Running tasks using external programs
  • Build
  • Test
  • Deploy
• tasks.json in your workspace folder
• Configure a particular program to be run
• You can run your psake or Invoke-Build scripts!
• Output goes to Output window unless you use the new terminal runner (set version to 2.0.0)

Debugging

Great debugging experience, we'll talk about this when we talk about the PowerShell extension.

Other Cool Stuff

• "Hot Exit": retains unsaved files on exit, restores on next session
• Markdown preview: Ctrl+Shift+V
• Zen mode: Ctrl+K Z
• Side by side editing: Ctrl+</kbd>

Configuration

User Settings

Open the configuration page by clicking File -> Preferences -> Settings or pressing Ctrl+, (comma).

Settings are searchable!

In the left pane, over over a setting and click the pencil icon to add the setting to your user settings file.

Workspace Settings

Override any user settings at the project level by editing your .vscode\settings.json file. You can also edit these in the settings editor by clicking "Workspace Settings" on the right side of the search bar of the Settings editor tab.

Useful Settings

• editor.fontSize

• editor.fontFamily

• editor.insertSpaces - Spaces, not tabs!

• editor.formatOnSave - Format your code just before it's saved

• editor.formatOnType - Format your code as you type!

• files.defaultLanguage: Set the default language for files created with Ctrl+N

• files.autoSave: Save your files automatically as you edit them, very configurable

• terminal.integrated.fontSize - Override `editor.fontSize in the integrated terminal

• terminal.integrated.fontFamily - Override editor.fontFamily in the integrated terminal

Theme Settings

• Workbench and syntax theming
  • Run "Preferences: Color Theme"
  • Try Sapphire by @Tyriar!
• Icon themes
  • Run "Preferences: File Icon Theme"
  • Try Seti (built in) or vscode-icons

Extensions

Finding and Installing Extensions

To browse extensions, launch the Extensions pane by clicking the icon in the left sidebar or pressing Ctrl+Shift+X.

Click the ... and click "Show Recommended Extensions" or "Show Popular Extensions" to find recommended and popular extensions.

Click the green "Install" button to install. A "Reload" will be required to activate the extension.

To automatically update extensions, you configure extensions.autoUpdate to true.

Cool Extensions

• PowerShell
• GitLens
• Vim
• Settings Sync

Check out other popular extensions on the Visual Studio Marketplace!

The PowerShell Extension

General editing features

• IntelliSense with paramset signatures and doc strings
• Syntax and rule-based analysis
• Code fixes
• Code formatting
• Basic symbol renaming
• Code navigation (Go to Definition F12, Find All References)

Integrated Console

• Fully integrated experience
• Press F8 in the editor to run current line or selection (right-click menu also)
• $psEditor!
  • Try out some API calls
  • $psEditor.Window.ShowErrorMessage("BOOM")
  • $psEditor.Window.SetStatusBarMessage("Hello!", 2000)
  • psedit <file path>
  • Check out the (slightly out of date) documentation

Debugging

• For basic PowerShell script debugging, just press F5!
• For everything else, you can create a launch.json configuration
• Debugging a specific script file
• Debugging modules (Plaster)
• Debugging Pester tests ("Interactive Session" configuration)
• Column breakpoints, stepping into pipelines
  • Get-Process | % { Write-Host $_.Name }

Other resources

• VS Code Tips and Tricks
• Visual Studio Code Insiders