Development

Symlink your content in Astro: a simple solution for greater portability and flexibility

March 15, 2023

Astro is a powerful static-site generator that allows developers to build lightning-fast websites. However, when trying to create a more portable and flexible blog by separating content from the website’s source, I faced issues with symlinks/content not being recognized/found. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through a simple solution to this problem and explain how you can easily symlink your content to an Astro project.

Use command URI in a Visual Studio Code webview to open files and links

February 23, 2023

If you work with webviews, you may want to open a link to a website or file within the same instance of Visual Studio Code. There are a couple of ways to achieve this, such as posting a message to the extension host or using the command URI option of your webview.

Creating a Submenu in VS Code: A Step-by-Step Guide

January 24, 2023

While creating a session about Visual Studio Code extension development, I discovered that creating a submenu in the context menus is possible. These submenus are a great way to make the context menus less cluttered and easier to use. Submenu in a context menu When trying it out, I could not make it work easily as the docs were unclear.

Creating timer dismissable notifications in a Visual Studio Code extension

December 21, 2022

Notifications in Visual Studio Code are trivial for your extensions to notify the user when something happens or a process completes. A downside of these notifications is that they cannot be dismissed programmatically; they require manual user interaction. As in my current extension, I wanted to be able to have a notification that can do the following:

Simplify Visual Studio Code extension webview communication

October 6, 2022

In Visual Studio Code extension webviews you probably need to get familiar with post-messaging communication. This post-messaging communication is used when you want to start a process, request information, etc. For this communication flow to work, the extension and webview can send and listen to incoming messages. Although this is not a complicated flow to understand, it quickly feels like a disconnected communication flow, as you cannot simply wait for a response.

Creating a reusable auth provider in Visual Studio Code

September 12, 2022

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how you could create an authentication provider for Visual Studio Code. In this article, we will take it further and make it reusable by other extensions. The reason for creating a reusable authentication provider could differ per solution. Maybe you want to make one for other extensions to leverage, or your company wants to release multiple extensions that can all use the same type of authentication.