Research Triangle PowerShell Users Group All Content, 21 Apr 2021

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From YouTube: Creating a VS Code Extension with Thomas Rayner (Thomas Rayner)

Description

Thomas Rayner shares with us how create your own VSCode extension with just a little bit of work using Typescript and PowerShell!

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A

All right, I'm, Thomas trainer, I'm, a senior security service engineer at Microsoft and I was going to show you an encryption module that I wrote, but it looks a lot similar to the demonstration Larry did so real quick I had an unencrypted file and a certificate and then I protected that with the certificate all of a sudden, it was encrypted and impossible to read.

A

Then you can unencrypted it and it's back to plain text but I'm not going to show you that I'm going to instead show you something that's equally on brand for me, but it doesn't have a ton to do with PowerShell and it's a Visual Studio code extension that I wrote for the session. I did for the Dutch PowerShell user group. It's called insert cat fact, and so I'm envious code and I'm just executing this command.

A

I didn't ctrl shift P and the extension that I wrote adds this cat facts command, which inserts a random cat fact. You can get it from the store and you can watch everything with how I built it here. Oh I'll go through it a little. This is an hour 15 minutes.

A

I'll keep it shorter than that for you guys, but on the Dutch partial user group channel I go through it in excruciating, detail, building the thing and to end, but the punchline is, if you know, PowerShell you're vaguely familiar at least with object-oriented programming languages, which PowerShell is vs coat. Extensions are written in typescript, and so it's just another object-oriented language, and so that knowledge that you've already built writing PowerShell along with the API.

A

The extension API documents that tell you how to interact with vs code means that you can publish your extension into the visual studio marketplace as well. So I'll take you on a quick tour of the code and what that looks like.

A

um These code modules have a whole bunch of files that come with them, but you don't really sort of use. Code. Extensions have a whole bunch of different files that come with them, but you only need to edit a couple to get going. The first is this package. Json and I just gave it a name. I said exactly what it does. I even gay I got an icon for it. Thank you, too Adil for creating my custom icon.

A

um That icon was this cat facts then, and then I tell it what commands I'm exposing so I'm, exposing this or I'm contributing this insert cat fat command. That's what came up when I my ctrl shift P and that's what this list comes from and then there's in the source folder.

A

This is the code that my extension actually performs. This is the good actual functional code. So if this package JSON was the like a PSD one for a module that describes kind of the metadata about your PowerShell module, this describes the metadata for my visual studio code extension. Then this extension dot TS is the actual like dot PSM one or the code. That's actually being executed and run so this is typescript.

A

It looks a little different than you're used to seeing in powershell, but I'm basically exposing the I'm importing a module, I'm importing the vs code module and I'm importing this other thing called Axios, which makes doing web calls easier like HTTP, gets and then I've got this URL that I can hit, which is super. If you oops.

A

It's not, you were all. Did you in Braddock a fact? So that's what's doing all the heavy lifting here when my function is activated I register, this M is cat, fax command and first things. First I have to find where the cursor is and then I do a get on that URL to retrieve my act and then I edit, the vs code window, I added the active text editor and insert at wherever the cursor is one of these fats and then that's really the entire thing from there.

A

You have like just a change log and it readme and things like that. But you package this up and you push it to the vs code marketplace and then anybody can install your super handy, dandy, cat, fax module, which I think is way better than like lorem ipsum or something or just any regular text. Filler that you might need to use so yeah I would encourage you to check out the code I'm accepting pull requests, if you want to add other api's or other cat fact related commands, or talk to me on twitter, at mr.

A

Thomas Raynor about obvious code or PowerShell or C, sharp or typescript, or any cool stuff like that. And then, if you wanted to actually know more about developing vs code extensions, you can watch this video at the Dutch, PowerShell user group channel or chat me up about it. Otherwise, I know it wasn't super power Shelley showing you all this today, but I didn't want to step on his toes there with my extension module I thought.

B

That was super cool and I'm glad that you got to share it with the R group, because that was a good talk as I participated in that before. And that was really I'm really getting for an interesting thing, because we should all be using vs code and it's good to see that it's possible. To actually add the add to the value of useful. By adding.

A

B

A

This rose, you can totally do.

A

There you go, it works in whatever different language provider you want, so you can use it in your powershell scripts all the time. It's a problem, real quick I know we're not doing a lot of questions, but just because I know the answer: is it possible to create an extension? That's private, only not in the marketplace? Yes, you can also add it to the marketplace and make it private within there and only expose it to certain organizations.

A

But when you build these things, you get a vsi xv6 package and you can side load those into this code. You can. Where is it.

A

I, don't want to fumble looking for it too long, but there's a load extension from file that you.

B

Can do Pete.

A

And you can load in whatever was just built and you can do that from the command line as well. Yeah, that's cool extension thanks.

B

A