Last week I was showing a co-worker some PowerShell code and he asked what the editor was that I was using. Visual Studio Code I said. Why do you use that? What does it do?

This is what I showed him

Runs on any Operating System

Code (as I shall refer to it) is free lightweight open source editor which runs on all the main operating systems. So you have the same experience in Linux as on Windows. So there is less to learn

Extensions

You can add new languages, themes, debuggers and tools from the extensions gallery to reduce the number of programmes you have open and the need to switch between programmes

You can add extensions using CTRL + SHIFT  + X and searching in the bar

or by going to the Extensions gallery searching for the extensions and copying the installation command

Debugging

There is a rich de-bugging experience built in

You can learn about debugging from the official docs and Keith Hill wrote a blog post on Hey Scripting Guys about debugging PowerShell

Intellisense

An absolute must to make life simpler. Code has intellisense for PowerShell and T-SQL which I use the most but also for many more languages . Read more here

Git integration

I love the Git integration, makes it so easy to work with GitHub for me. I can see diffs, commit, undo commits nice and simply. Just open the root folder of the repository and its there

This page will give you a good start on using git with Code

No distractions

With full screen mode (F11) or Zen mode (CTRL +K, Z) I can concentrate on coding and not worry about distractions

Stay in one programme and do it all

I have a Markdown document, a PowerShell script and a T-SQL script all in one Git repository and I can work on all of them and version control in one place. The screencast below also shows some of the new capabilities available in the insiders version I managed to leave the screen recording dialogue open as well, apologies and the mistake was deliberate!

I used the GitLens and SQL beautify extensions as well as the dbatools module in that demo

That’s why I am using Code more and more these days, hope it helps

Happy Automating!