Developing Multi-Platform Apps with Visual Studio Code

Get up and running with VS Code by building multi-platform, cloud-native, and microservices-based apps

Ovais Mehboob Ahmed Khan, Khusro Habib

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838826642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Application Development
• Index: Computer Science

Redefine your software development experience by understanding the extensive features and rich functionalities offered by Visual Studio Code

Key Features

• Leverage the power of the free, cross-platform, and highly customizable code editor to build modern web and cloud applications
• Edit, debug and deploy on Microsoft Azure with Visual Studio Code
• Learn how to customize features and install a wide variety of third-party extensions

Book Description

Microsoft Visual Studio Code is a powerful, lightweight code editor for modern web and cloud development. It is a source code editor that can be used with a variety of programming languages, which works on multiple platforms such as Linux, Windows, and macOS. This book provides extensive coverage of the tools, functionalities, and extensions available within the VS Code environment that will help you build multi-platform apps with ease.

You'll start with the installation of VS Code and learn about various tools and features that are essential for development. Progressing through the chapters, you'll explore the user interface while understanding tips and tricks for increasing productivity. Next, you'll delve into VS Code extensions and discover how they can make life easier for developers. Later, the book shows you how to develop a sample application with different programming languages, tools, and runtimes to display how VS code can be used effectively for development, before helping you get to grips with source code version management and deployment on Azure with VS Code. Finally, you'll build on your skills by focusing on remote development with VS Code.

By the end of this book, you'll have the knowledge you need to use Visual Studio Code as your primary tool for software development.

What you will learn

• Explore various editing, formatting, and navigational features of VS Code
• Understand how to add, delete, and configure extensions in VS Code
• Develop web APIs using Node.js, Java, and Python in VS Code
• Develop background service in.NET Core and explore Dapr
• Delve into debugging techniques such as breakpoints, log points, and data inspection
• Use Git with Azure DevOps to share and synchronize code with VS Code
• Create custom extensions in VS Code to increase developer productivity
• Understand the concepts of remote development using VS Code

Who this book is for

This book is for software developers, web developers and polyglot programmers, who are working with any language or framework such as Python, Java, Node.js, or.NET and are looking to learn how they can create multi-platform, microservices based, cloud-native applications while effectively using Visual Studio Code for editing, debugging, version management and deployment. Basic software development skills are a must to grasp the concepts covered in this book.

Section 1: Introduction to Visual Studio Code

This section focuses on the basics of Visual Studio Code, starting with a brief introduction to Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and editors, followed with some command-line options, tips, and tricks. It then covers key features of Visual Studio Code that will help learners develop complete knowledge about the tool.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Getting Started with Visual Studio Code
• Chapter 2, Extensions in Visual Studio Code

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code or, as it is mostly called, VS Code, is one of the most popular coding tools today. It focuses on being fast and extendible, and can build up to the needs of a wider developer community.

Earlier, the focus was on providing developers with an extensive development environment that could integrate the complete software development life cycle, from writing code to deploying the solution. To increase productivity, several in-built features were provided to automate repetitive tasks. Most of the environments supported a particular language and an abundance of prebuilt features for that language.

As the industry moved from thick installable clients to web-based applications, the choice of development platforms and tools also changed. These browser-based web applications that were developed using HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript did not require heavy integrated development environments, but rather, simple and plain editors.

Looking at this change, Microsoft released its first cross-platform and multi-language support editor in 2015, called VS Code.

VS Code is a fast and lightweight editor that follows the concept of take what you need. The extension framework provides flexibility and has created a marketplace where extensive tooling features are available for use. It also allows the automation of build processes and has strong integration with Git for version control management. It allows developers to install and build an environment according to their specific needs.

In this chapter, we will take you through the basics of an editor and walk through the key difference between an editor and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). To get acquainted with VS Code, we will start by setting up the environment and exploring several options. Finally, we will highlight some tips and tricks that can increase your productivity. At the end of this chapter, you will be up and running with VS Code, have a good knowledge of how to configure the tool, and will be aware of some neat tricks. So, let's get started.

The main topics covered in this chapter are the following:

• Discussing editors and IDEs
• Discussing basic features of VS Code
• Setting up VS Code
• Exploring the VS Code layout
• Editing and code navigation in VS Code

Discussing editors and IDEs

Our focus in is this book is to explore and learn VS Code, but before we do that, let's discuss the difference between an editor and IDE and try to understand where and how VS Code is positioned for developers.

Over time, several languages and frameworks have become available for developers to work with. Along with these languages, a considerable amount of effort has been put in place to create the right tool to increase developer productivity and support the complete development life cycle.

These tools can be categorized into editors and IDEs.

Editors support a variety of languages, work around files and folders, and they are limited in terms of projects or solutions. They are lightweight and predominantly keyboard-centric, which allows developers to work faster.

IDEs support code editing, compiling, and debugging, as well as code execution. They are mainly specific to a particular language or a few selective languages. They usually work with project or solution file...