Julia Reid walks through three main topics in this entertaining session about Visual Studio Code: the Visual Studio Code, CMake and vcpkg trifecta, remote development, including containers, and collaboration using LiveShare.

I did a review on a different session last year (link at the end of this post), and it’s great to see that VSC and CMake enjoy such a close collaboration, and vcpkg gaining ground as a package manager. All is welcome.

If you do remote development, particularly on headless, remote machines, this talk is for you. I’ve been using this feature over the last year and have been really happy–allows me to have a central dev machine and connect to multiple servers at once. Furthermore, this session tackles developing from containers, which I’ll definitely revisit. Oh, and also port forwarding!

Julia also covers pair programming à la mode; that is, virtual. I’ve used this feature once, and mostly to make sure it worked. But, if it floats your boat, go ahead.

What I liked about this session is that Julia peels away the complexity in setting up a development environment using Visual Studio Code that is complete, and covers every aspect of the development cycle, from setting up, compiling, building, debugging, and yes, SCM. As a side note, have you noticed that Compiler Explorer now seems to be using VSC under the hood? Couldn’t help but notice that the Find dialogs look exactly the same. Oh, well.

The C++ extension is now 1.0. Wow, it’s been some time in the making–four years, per the talk, but will check it out. It comes with support for Linux on ARM/ARM64, VC code formatting, and an extension pack, packed with goodies. Oh, and support for Doxygen comments. Will pick them up and show them. Nifty.

Sneak Peek: UI for vcpkg.

Ready to jump in? Enjoy the session.

Tara Raj did this session last year: