Chapter 10: Visual Studio Code and Containers

In Chapter 9, Visual Studio Code and WSL, we saw how the Visual Studio Code editor allows the user interface to be separated from other functionality that interacts with our code and runs it. With WSL, this allows us to keep the familiar Windows-based user interface while running all the key parts of our project in Linux. In addition to allowing the code interactions to run in a server component in WSL, Visual Studio Code also allows us to connect to the code server via SSH or to run it in a container. The ability to run in a container is provided by the Remote-Containers extension, and this chapter will focus on how we can use this functionality. We will see how we can use these development containers (or dev container) to encapsulate our project dependencies. By doing this, we make it easier to onboard people to our projects and gain an elegant way to isolate potentially conflicting toolsets between projects.

In this chapter, we&apos...