Today we’re announcing a new version of the MDN Quickstart extension for Visual Studio Code. This extension allows developers to directly contribute to MDN’s content through the code editor they are already using every day.
As part of this release, we have also partnered with GitHub to integrate your favorite code editor with your favorite open-source hosting platform.
MDN Quickstart with GitHub Integration
The MDN Quickstart extension offers a first-class experience for developers who want to contribute to MDN. With this update, you can now link your GitHub account and create pull requests (PR) directly from VS Code. This integration with GitHub will help you:
Clone any MDN repository
Sign in and create pull requests
Get ready to submit your PRs!
MDN Quickstart with GitHub Integration
MDN Quickstart with GitHub Integration
In this tutorial, you’ll create a repository on GitHub and import it into Visual Studio Code. You’ll then commit changes to your project and push them to GitHub. This tutorial is aimed at people who are new to using version control, but have some experience using the command line. It covers the basic steps to work with a Git repository: creating a project and committing changes.
If you want a more detailed overview of working with Git in Visual Studio Code, check out the Git integration documentation.
Visual Studio Code is a lightweight code editor with support for many languages. In this Quickstart, we’ll create a simple Java application, run it locally and then deploy it to the cloud.
If you don’t have Visual Studio Code installed, download and install it for your OS from the Visual Studio Code website.
Visual Studio Code is an open source editor available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It’s cross-platform and supports syntax highlighting for many programming languages. You can also extend Visual Studio Code to add your own extensions. We’ll see examples of these extensions as we go through this Quickstart.
Visual Studio Code is a lightweight, yet powerful source code editor that runs on your desktop. It has support for debugging, embedded Git control and GitHub, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring. It is highly customizable, allowing users to change the theme, keyboard shortcuts, preferences, and install extensions that add additional functionality.
Installation
To download the latest version of Visual Studio Code, visit https://code.visualstudio.com/Download. Windows users can choose between a 32-bit or 64-bit version; we recommend using the 64-bit installer when possible.
Once downloaded and installed from the .exe file you can launch it from your Start menu or desktop icon. The first time you launch Visual Studio Code it will ask if you want to continue with the default settings or customize these settings; we recommend taking the defaults unless you have strong reasons not to do so. Once open Visual Studio Code will look like this:
Visual Studio Code Java extension can use information contained on Maven, Gradle and Lumg to provide recommendations. These extensions are enabled by default.
Maven for Java
Maven is a popular Java build tool. If you have a pom.xml file in your repository, the language extensions will offer the following features:
Java Depedency Viewer
The language server will index all available dependencies and allow you to quickly view them with Go to Symbol in Workspace (⌘T (Windows, Linux Ctrl+T)), or by clicking on an import statement.
Automatic import suggestions
The language server will suggest import statements as you type.
Some of the features we’ll cover, like code completion, will work for any language. Others, like debugging, are specific to JavaScript. We’ll show you how to set up a project for your own language later in the tutorial.
The rest of this tutorial will take you through the steps to create a new extension and publish it to the Visual Studio Marketplace. If you’d prefer to watch a video version instead, you can find one here:
We’ll start by creating a minimal Hello World extension that introduces you to the structure of an extension and the basic files required. Then we’ll add a few more commands and styles. We’ll finish up by adding a custom HTML page to our extension as well as access to Visual Studio Code’s APIs.
The last time we visited Visual Studio Code, I mentioned that we might be interested in adding support for additional languages. Since then, some of us on the Developer Advocacy team have been spending more time in VS Code and we noticed several things:
* The extension model is easy to work with, and well-documented.
* The community has created extensions for a wide variety of languages, including JavaScript, Node.js, Python, C