After creating a working dev container configuration for an ASP.NET Core with Angular project, I wanted to also try it out with GitHub Codespaces. I had to do additional changes to the configuration to get it working.
For simple projects with a single technology stack, you're likely to find a dev container template preconfigured with everything you need. That's what happened to me when I created my first dev container. For larger projects with more than one technology stack, more configuration will be needed.
In a previous blog post, I described how Dev Containers can make web development easier for projects that assume Linux/macOS development environment. The approach works best when you can get the Dev Container configuration committed to the upstream repository. If that's not an option, you'll have to fiddle with your own branches or uncommitted changes to use them. Fortunately, VS Code supports an alternative approach to configuring the Dev Containers.
I wanted to fix a bug in Tabliss that had been bothering me for some time, but I could not build the project on Windows without changing the NPM scripts. So I decided to try Visual Studio Code Dev Containers.
I recently attended an online presentation on how to effectively use Visual Studio Code. The presenter did a great job of explaining the keyboard shortcuts he used. It would have been even easier for him if he had turned on screencast mode to show the keyboard shortcuts and the actions triggered in the editor. He was very excited when I told him about it after the presentation. I decided to do some research on similar features in other editors I use regularly.
When creating a new project using Angular CLI you can choose to have SCSS support in the project preconfigured. But even if you do, it doesn't set up any file for the rules that will be reused across components (such as variables, functions, and mixins).
Recently I was involved in troubleshooting an interesting issue with running unit tests for a Javascript project that was depending on a native Node module. The key step in resolving the issue was when we determined that the tests ran fine from the command line and only failed when the Mocha Test Explorer extension for Visual Studio Code was used.
If you've ever used a JetBrains IDE like IntelliJ IDEA, WebStorm or Rider you might have noticed the CamelHumps option for keyboard navigation which allows you to jump by word in a camel-cased identifier instead of by the whole identifier. The same functionality ia also available in the ReSharper Visual Studio extension. When I started using Visual Studio Code regularly, this was one of the features I missed.
It's April again and last Saturday it was time for the annual Global Azure Bootcamp event. The Slovenian one was taking place at the local Microsoft offices. In my session, I explained how to configure Visual Studio Code to improve the experience of .NET Core development as much as possible.
I've been doing a lot of Ionic 2 development lately in Visual Studio Code lately. The editor has great out-of-the-box support for TypeScript, HTML and CSS editing. There's also a lively ecosystem for extensions, which can improve the development experience even further. I'm going to describe my current configuration and the selection of extensions that I'm using.
The official Android emulator has a big disadvantage for regular users of Hyper-V: you cannot run the emulator accelerated when Hyper-V is enabled. Fortunately, there is an alternative: Visual Studio Emulator for Android, which uses Hyper-V for hardware acceleration.
Many operators and other symbols in programming languages consist of multiple characters, but still represent a single token. Although as programmers we learned to view these symbols as single logical units, ligatures allow joining of multiple neighboring letters into a single glyph. With correct fonts and editor support these can be used to improve the rendering of source code on screen.
Ionic 2 is the successor to the quite popular hybrid mobile framework. It is based upon Angular 2, but unlike it, it hasn't yet reached the final release; the latest version is Release Candidate 3. This makes it still a bit rough around the edges and lacking in documentation. Debugging with source maps is one of the features, which still pose a challenge to set up for many developers.