Developing C++ with Visual Studio Code

ACharLuk — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 14:44:59 +0000

Welcome to my first post! I will be showing you how I develop C++ using Visual Studio Code along with the C++ and Easy C++ Projects extensions.

Downloading Visual Studio Code

First we will need a code editor or IDE, I personally like Visual Studio Code (VSC for short) because it is lightweight like Sublime, but has some of the features I like from IDEs, specially Intellisense. You can download Visual Studio Code here, you will land on a page like this:

Click the download button and wait a few seconds for the download to start.

Setting up VSC for C++ development

The first time you open VSC you will see a welcome window. VSC has a very simple layout: a bar on the left with 5 buttons (File explorer, Find, Git integration, Debug, Extensions), a status bar on the bottom and a window with tabs for the editors. Click the last button to open Extensions:

To develop C++ we will install two extensions, the first one is C/C++, which is already shown in the last figure, to install it just click the green button that says Install:

Then we will search for "easy c++" and then install the extension called "Easy C++ Projects"

Environment setup finished

After installing the extensions, a blue button will appear saying Reload, clicking it will reload the window and activate the extensions we just installed, as shown here:

Good job! Now we have an environment for depeloping our first C++ project!

Creating our first C++ project with Visual Studio Code!

After setting up VSC for C++ development, we just need to create a new project! This is done in a few steps:

Creating a folder for the project

To set the folder for the project, go to File > Open folder (or press [Ctrl+K Ctrl+O]), a dialog like this will pop up:

Create a new folder and press "Select folder", the dialog will close and the window will reload and open the folder we have created.

Creating a C++ project

Press F1, a little window will appear with lots of different commands, search for "c++" and click "Create new C++ project":

Now we will be asked what compiler we want to use, look the Easy C++ extension page for information on how to setup a compiler for your operating system. I will use Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Code!

Now that we finished the creation step, VSC will generate the project structure for us, and open main.cpp with some example code:

To test that the project works press the Build & Run button on the status bar, a terminal will open and it will compile and execute our program for the first time!

DEV Community: ACharLuk