CppCon 2017: Rong Lu “C++ Development with Visual Studio Code”

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If you’re looking for a fast and lightweight code editor, Visual Studio Code has you covered. Come get an overview of Visual Studio Code along with the C++ extension that enables editing, building, and debugging your C++ code across Windows, Mac, and Linux.
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Rong Lu: Microsoft, Senior Program Manager

Rong Lu is a Program Manager in the Visual C++ team at Microsoft. She has been working on the Visual Studio team for the past 10 years since she graduated with her master degree in computer science. She is currently working on Visual Studio tools for game development, Visual C++ tools for mobile development, and the C++ experience in Visual Studio Code. She has been a frequent speaker at many conferences since 2007.
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[tomkirbygreen]

Great presentation. I do maybe half of my cross platform work under Mac OS and the rest on Windows and deeply appreciate Codes ability to start and stop on a dime. VS Studio is what I crack open when I need a industrial strength debugger but honestly the rest of Visual Studio 2017 is wasted on me. Love the investment MS have brought to Code in making it a first class C++ editor regardless of platform. The Git integration is a thing of joy. Major kudos to the Code team, it’s supplanted Sublime for me.

[batner]

Visual Studio Code was invented because of Sublime and other editors first/ide is a plugin system.
Still the idea of running a microsoft free product on my linux box was weird.

[DimiterStanev]

Thank you Rong Lu for the nice presentation!

[shadowmil]

VSCode appears to suffer from the same problem that caused me to drop Visual Studio, phantom red lines, slow prompts, etc. Still neat and glad to see something a bit more lightweight then visual studios full.

[witM]

There's should be some variable '${configurationName}' available in tasks.json to use that will hold current selected configuration name from cpp_property.json. This is needed to use with some build tools running as a task so please like this.

[gavinw]

I wish you didn't skip the important part here .. setting up a compiler to work with VS Code. This is why I quickly forgot about VS Code a year ago, because It's just easier using Visual Studio. The Microsoft documentation for setting up the compiler jumps around, and obviously doesn't walk through the correct steps. I've installed Mingw, I have added env variable for gcc.exe. And the code you use to invoke the compiler doesn't work, there is no such thing as 'g++', there is a 'gcc' exe. But I get gcc.exe: error: CreateProcess: No such file or directory The terminal process terminated with exit code: 1. This is my second day of trying to get the damn compiler to just work in VS Code.

Please cover the difficult part.

[kungfooman]

Nice tool and nice talk and nice speaker :^)

[IllumTheMessage]

These are great improvements! Good talk Rong.

[billleonard]

Sorry, I can't make out what Rong is saying the name of the parser: Techparser? Tachparser? She uses it to resolve the locations of the include files in the second half of the video. I got that it's an alternative to the intellisence-based engine but I can't search for more information about it without knowing how to spell it.

[chloroformcowboy]

Charismatic & well designed/organized presentation (and thankfully /not/ the time-wasting, self-serving variant of presenter charisma where the presenter relies on their personality because they don't know enough about the subject to be giving a talk about it).. so thumbs up from me. The video satisfied my intention: as someone who strongly believed that VS Code probably wasn't for me, but hears a lot of hype about it, I quickly got a sense of what using it is like, without having to install it.

[felixkimutai]

Thank you, mine wasn't working until I watched your video

[maximyanchenko]

Does it support multi-language code? E.g. Python code inside a C++ string literal, or doxygen docs in comments, or things like jsp etc?
Is it possible to customize highlighting patterns? E.g. show all std:: or BOOST_PP prefix in macro names in dimmed style?
Is it possible to have project-specific variables (e.g. for specific build/debug/run variants)? If so, is it possible to have them exposed in UI (say Boolean as switches)?

[kamalabuhenamostafa]

that is not true, lu, it knows what it should take and not to. Actually, the rule is "universal". By the way, , we start with Xp and we are not ungrateful, actually we do not business for personal profit of any kind.

[dorinlazar]

I use VSCode daily - and even if the C++ plugin breaks with every upgrade (I work on an older machine) I still think it's the leanest tool out there which I can use safely. Lovely talk, but I think there's only two things that are new for me here.

[mateferencnagy-egri]

It might not be a popular opinion, but I think this demo was borderline harmful, rather than something to get me excited about C++ & VS Code. Don't get me wrong, I would love to use VS Code for C++ development, but it's just too far from big brother VS. Rong does mention CMake Tools (just sent my first PR to it, have been using it for a long time now), but without CMake Tools, this extension is a pain. Manually editing JSON files in 2017 and hunting squigglies... it's awful. Notice how the Calculator app takes 15 minutes to write, and out of which 14 minutes is setup. How far away is that from Compiler Explorer per say? It's a joke that for quick testing some web platform is better than all local tools! VS Code load times are longer than opening Compiler Explorer!!!! (Of course, it's based on TypeScript, another web technology.) The sad thing is, VS Code would be 10 times less compelling for developers if every part of it were native code, or .NET even. When a glorified text editor takes 4-5 seconds to launch on a quad-core 2+GHz notebook... something is very wrong with the world.

[andreaslegomovies]

To be honest, I think they found most of the worst "features" of VS, bundled them up and called it VS code.

[greob]

I wonder if VS Code will ever become as "big" as Visual Studio proper...
It's great that is runs well on Linux, but a bit of a shame it's Electron based.