Visual Studio Code

9Working with Extensions

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding how to find, install, and configure extensions
• Learning some of the more popular and useful extensions in the Marketplace

One of the main design considerations for Visual Studio Code was extensibility—after creating a top‐notch editor experience, that is. Consider the proliferation of frameworks and the speed of growth in the tools that are used to develop applications, web or otherwise. It seems like new versions of Angular, React, and Vue are coming out every month, not to mention new frameworks that are being created or languages that are becoming fashionable. It would be impossible for a single team to be able to keep the tooling for any development environment up to date. The Visual Studio Code team was well aware of this fact. On top of that, its IDE namesake, Visual Studio, has a history of being extensible, dating all the way back to the Visual Basic days of the early 1990s. So allowing extensions was a no‐brainer of a decision.

As a result of this approach it’s quite likely that, at some point in your development process, you will be using an extension. Extensions support different languages, different testing frameworks, different source control providers, and different syntax and style checking. And, depending on what you’re doing, you will choose the extensions that matter to your workflow.

In this chapter, we start by looking at the Extension Marketplace, and discuss how to search for and install ...