Visual Studio Code

6Debugging Code

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding how to launch applications from within Visual Studio Code
• Learning about the various debug actions that are supported
• Creating launch configurations that support multiple simultaneous debug sessions

By now, it has been pretty well established that Visual Studio Code is a solid editor. And perhaps even a little better than solid. But if you're coming from a more “full‐featured” development environment (thinking of you, Visual Studio and Eclipse), having an extraordinary editor isn't enough. You're used to being able to execute and debug your application from within your IDE. And while you can use other tools to debug web applications, it's still really convenient to have editing, executing, and debugging in one place.

Fortunately, Visual Studio Code can meet this requirement. In this chapter, we look at how to debug your web application from within the IDE. Although a number of debugger extensions allow other languages to be debugged, the capabilities that are native to Visual Studio Code are impressive.

DEBUGGING NODE.JS

Being able to use your editor as a debugging environment is a powerful idea. This is even more true when you're working in a web environment, where the web server frequently detects changes in the files and reloads all or part of the application dynamically.

Visual Studio Code comes with the ability to debug Node.js applications without additional installations required. This section will walk through ...