Preface

Developing Multi-Platform Apps with Visual Studio Code aims at exploring various functionalities of VS Code as an editor by taking the reader through a journey of developing a microservices based cloud native application.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part covers an introduction to VS Code, its features and the use of extensions. This creates a keen understanding of VS Code as an editor, by discussing the tooling features, increasing productivity and providing greater flexibility to a developer.

The second part covers building a cloud native application, based on multiple platforms. It starts by discussing the overall architecture and then moves on to developing the complete application. The application is based on a microservices architecture, where each backend service and the frontend is based on different technologies. The respective chapters elaborate the steps required to extend VS Code functionality to enable support for multiple platforms. The book also discusses Azure Event Hubs with Kafka protocol for inter-application messaging, Azure Kubernetes Services for container orchestration, Git and Azure DevOps for version management and deployment respectively. It also features Dapr for publishing messages to Kafka. Finally touching upon debugging the book explores the common VS Code debugging features along with the specific extensions required for each platform. All these topics are covered in this book in the most interactive manner to encourage you to try the examples yourself.

The last part covers advance topics related to VS Code such as creating custom extensions and remote development with examples.