I did use VSCode for a while a long time ago, simply as an editor to build ASP.NET with AngularJs project. Since I am using Mac at home, regardless of switching tools for different OS is very convenient. Back then, I have installed few extensions such as C#, TSLint mainly for the development environment.
But there are still so much to explore like I didn’t aware the live debugging feature before. And also, the main language of VSCode source code is TypeScript (91.5%, can’t believe I missed it 😵) and they use Electron to make it platform-independent as well.
Back to the topic, if we want to contribute to VSCode, there’re some prerequisites we need in order to build their source code. I have used Homebrew before, so the whole process of getting prerequisites went pretty smooth.
Build the source:
yarn run watch
Run development version of VSCode:
./scripts/code.sh
Now you can go hack Visual Studio Code!
Wait a minute before I end my blog.
Have you wondered why do you need all the prerequisites when you go through all steps and get them? And also why do they choose one over another?
I do. I don’t know what yarn is and I looked it up.
However, after reading yarn’s getting started page, I didn’t feel that impressed and a question popped up on my head – yarn does the exact same thing as npm, so why don’t Microsoft just use npm instead?
Then I found the official announcement of yarn from Facebook, so basically, they introduce issues that npm has raised, the attempts and the solution. It’s a pretty good article if you want to get a closer look at yarn.
So, what really turns me into yarn is the new process they built to fetch the packages. If you have been used npm for a while, you probably found the “works on my machine” bugs very frustrated. Especially, when you work with the release, it really takes up the time to figure out what the problem is. Although you can use npm ShrinkWrap as a workaround to lock down package version, it still requires extra efforts to consistently monitor and update.
Well, now with yarn, when you modify your package, it will automatically update the yarn.lock file, which ensures the exact same package being installed on different machines every time you run yarn. Hooray🙌🙌!
👨🏻💻 Choy's 