Estimated Time: ~15 minutes
<aside> 💡 Welcome to CodeLab's article on setting up your development environment! Here, you'll learn how to set up Visual Studio Code, configure your settings, and download some useful extensions!
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While there are a variety of tools available when developing, we like to use a standardized set. Even if you are familiar with different tools, learning new ones helps to spread your knowledge of various different services available and is highly encouraged.
Most of the tools we use revolve around our choice in IDE.
Visual Studio Code, often referred to as VSCode, is the required CodeLab IDE. It's useful particularly because of its customizability - it offers thousands of community extensions to enhance your development experience, is incredibly fast, and is very commonly used in industry.
VSCode is incredibly easy to download - simply go here and choose your OS and then follow any on-screen instructions.
Most extensions that you need are language-specific, and therefore we'll let the PM for your specific project mention them. However, to install one you can simply click on the icon shown below on the left hand side of VSCode:
While there are a number of great extensions available in VSCode, the only one we really recommend for all teams is live share - it allows multiple people to work on the same set of files at the same time. So if Abby wants to host her webserver to work on with Mike, she can send him a live share link, and if they both have the extension, they can edit the same set of files simultaneously. They can also see the output go to Abby's web server together, as well as be able to track where the other person is editing in real-time and see the changes they make take effect. To download it, simply type ms-vsliveshare.vslivesh into the extensions search bar.
There are also a various number of extensions that we on the board find particularly useful - these aren't required to install but can be very helpful (feel free to find your own as well!).