My first Microsoft Visual Studio Code [VSCode] extension

I’m a published developer! [sort of] Well that was a bit painful, well not actually I mean from the documentation I feel I was a bit mislead.

So for those of you that know what I do for a living I’m primarily an Analyst Developer with a skill set of VBA and SQL which has put me in good stead for the last 10+ years. I’m currently ‘up-skilling’ myself on more general programming languages, but enough of that! I basically wanted to use VSCode with VBA which is fine as it’s just text files but I wanted some of the shexy stuff that VSCode comes with.

I’m not going to go into how awesome (I think) VSCode is here but I will mention that for the purpose of me wanting to use (or at least see syntax highlighting) I found this extension for VBScript which was neat but didn’t give me any intellisense for even the most straight forward stuff like to create a Sub or Function.

So that got me playing around with making my own snippets and I found that after a while I had quite a lot of them so I decided to put them on the VSCode market place.

So, what I found is that Microsoft really want you to make VSCode extensions and give you all the tools you need to do so.

I found guides here, here and here all of which have you using Yeoman by installing via npm, now I’ve never heard of Yeoman before trying to do this so I don’t have an opinion on that apart from to say it was a bit of a ballache to get any of it up and running. I tried installing it on both my home machine and a Cloud9 machine several times over with no success.

Got tired after uninstalling and reinstalling several times at home and on the cloud so moved on. I read this guide about setting yourself up as a publisher on the Microsoft VSCode Marketplace using with vsce (agin installed with npm) so after creating a Personal Access Token and creating my publisher account I could then publish my extension. But this was the thing my extension is just the vbscrip.json file on my hard drive.

How do I make it into a extension?

After reading up on extension I thought that you needed to have your package ‘packaged’ with a .vsix extension so looking at the links earlier you need to install Yeoman (bugger!)

I looked around at other snippets packages on GitHub and couldn’t understand why I needed to have my snippets packaged up in this .vsix file, all it was, was the .json file from my computer.

So this is what I did, I copied the file structure from one of another GitHub repositories that were just snippets, it basically consisted of two folders and a package.json file. I replaced all the relevant properties in the .json file and created a GitHub repository just for the sake of having all my lovingly crafted snippets kept safe.

So it looked like I had no way to get this onto the Marketplace, I was pretty bummed but thought I’d just go though the process of publishing an extension with vsce by cd’ing to the folder the package was in and going through the commands so I tried vsce publish 1.0.0

I was pretty surprised (and relieved) to see the output pictured.

I had a quick check of my publisher profile and lo and behold, there’s my extension!

Here’s my extension: VBA Snippets from there you can fin the GitHub repository too, I hope it comes in handy for you one day!