AWS VS Code Toolkit Targets Serverless Cloud Development -- Visual Studio Magazine

AWS VS Code Toolkit Targets Serverless Cloud Development

By David Ramel
07/17/2019

Cloud development giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made a new toolkit for Visual Studio Code generally available, especially tuned to serverless (Lambda functions) development.

AWS last week announced that the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, in preview since November 2018, graduated to general availability. The VS Code extension from the No. 1 cloud platform courts users of the open source, cross-platform code editor that has become the No. 1 dev tool of choice, according to multiple surveys.

"Visual Studio Code has become an enormously popular tool for serverless developers, partly due to the intuitive user interface," AWS said. "It's also because of the rich ecosystem of extensions that can customize and automate so much of the development experience. We are excited to announce that the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code extension is now generally available, making it even easier for the development community to build serverless projects using this editor."

Despite the availability of the Azure cloud that would seemingly be the No. 1 choice among Microsoft-centric developers, AWS continues to try to attract that camp. For example, the VS Code offering joins the existing AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio that gained VS 2019 support in March.

The new VS Code offering is optimized for serverless computing, wherein AWS Lambda functions can be executed in response to triggers or events. "The toolkit enables you to easily develop serverless applications, including creating a new project, local debugging, and deploying your project -- all conveniently from within the editor," the AWS post says. In addition to .NET (C#), the toolkit supports Node.js and Python.

Appealing to VS Code developers, AWS said they can use the tool to:

Test your code locally with step-through debugging in a Lambda-like environment.
Deploy your applications to the AWS Region of your choice.
Invoke your Lambda functions locally or remotely.
Specify function configurations such as an event payload and environment variables.

The July 11 post details how to build a serverless application, including listing the prerequisites.

Code for the tool is parked on GitHub under an open source Apache License, version 2.0.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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