Visual Studio Code

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is a free and open-source code editor built on Chromium. It includes built-in support for a variety of languages and tools, including all of those used in this class (JavaScript, React, Java, SQL, git / GitHub) and has a large catalog of extensions that can be installed to provide additional framework support or otherwise enhance the development experience.

Visual Studio Code was introduced to CSIL in 2019, and is now the preferred code editor for this course. It can be downloaded on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, or used on the web (with limited features) on vscode.dev or github.dev.

According to Stack Overflow’s 2022 Developer Survey, Visual Studio Code is the most popular development environment across all developers, with 74.48% of all respondents and 81.04% of those learning to code using VS Code. We encourage students to use VS Code as their text editor to align our course with industry standards.

Recommended Extensions

The course staff recommends installing the following extensions in VS Code for an optimal development experience with the current tech stack:

Framework / Library Extensions

• Extension Pack for Java (Microsoft official)
  • Includes the following extensions:
    • Red Hat Java Language Support
    • Debugger for Java
    • Test Runner for Java (supports JUnit)
    • Maven for Java
    • Project Manager for Java
    • IntelliCode
• Lombok Annotations Support (Microsoft official)
• Jest
• DotENV

Development Tools

• Remote Development Extension Pack (Microsoft official)
  • Includes the following extensions:
    • Remote - WSL
    • Remote - Containers
    • Remote - SSH
    • Remote - SSH: Editing Configuration Files
• Code Spell Checker

The following extension has also been used by many students for the purposes of pair programming, but has not been officially been used / tested by the course staff. It has been mentioned here for completeness.

• Live Share (Microsoft official)

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