Making the project creation and use more intuitive

[nav9]

Type: General

Hi. This is an offshoot of this feature request microsoft/vscode#111339 which they requested me to post here. It's basically about making the project creation and use a more intuitive process.

[TryerGit]

A project means different things in different contexts. In Visual Studio IDE, a project usually refers to a .vcxproj file. While I can understand your pain at transitioning to VSCode, please note that my view is that it is a sophisticated and powerful text editor (I do not work for Microsoft and am an anonymous user, so caveat emptor) and not an IDE. Its power comes precisely from the fact that it is bare-bones and requires the user to configure stuff. In this respect, I think it is like Vim. (Personally, I prefer VSCode to Vim for C++ development but that is my view and there are others who will disagree vehemently.)

An IDE is helpful for users but also hides many things behind the scenes. I worked many years using Visual Studio IDE without knowing anything about cl.exe or msbuild.exe or what a .vcxproj file does or how one can set properties using .props property sheet files. However, in transitioning to VSCode, I have learned more about these components, what Visual Studio IDE does behind the scene when building a project. Likewise, on Linux systems, one can use an IDE but doing so hides knowledge about how compilation and build happens using g++, gcc, Makefiles, etc. To become a more complete developer, I feel these are important pieces of knowledge.

In any case, I made a post on Stack Overflow about how one can use VSCode coming from Visual Studio background on Windows or a Netbeans background in linux.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/65015872/492307

Hope that helps.

[sean-mcmanus]

@nav9 We need more info about you're looking for. What OS and compiler and build system do you intend to use? Did you see the tutorial docs at https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/cpp/config-msvc, https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/cpp/config-wsl, etc.?

VS Code doesn't really have "projects". You're expected to install whatever compiler and build systems you need yourself since those are available externally. However, if you install the CMake Tools extension (and a compiler), open an empty folder, run CMake: Quick Start and follow the various popup prompts, then it'll create a basic CMakeLists.txt for building, a main.cpp, and then you can do CMake: Debug, which is sort of a like a "project". See

If you don't want to use CMake, you could use tasks.json to build (e.g. Build and Debug Active file).

[nav9]

Thank you Sean. Well, if the IDE and extensions are designed to be as such, then there is nothing more for me to say. I apologize for taking up your time.
I was using it on Ubuntu 16.04. gcc 4.5.

[bobbrow]

For what it's worth, the VS Code team is working on improvements to the Welcome screen which provides an opportunity for us to explore defining some "getting started" type tasks (e.g. create a C++ project). While it's true we don't try to be an IDE by packaging compilers and such together, I think there are some things we can do to make the out-of-box experience nicer for people. Thank you for your feedback.