development-notes.md

Development Notes 2019-12-27, Bob Dubner

This folder is for developing the cbl-dbg extension.

First, of course, you have to have Visual Studio Code installed

Making sure you have the correct software installed so that you can install additional correct software is the usual infinite regress bookended in insanity. I no longer recall how I got bootstrapped in; I think I installed snap (or maybe it was already present on Ubuntu) and then used

sudo snap install --classic code
sudo snap install --classic code-insiders

for the regular and bleeding-edge versions of Visual Studio Code. You probably don't need the bleeding-edge code-insiders version.

I don't at what point npm was installed. I do know that getting vsce to work involved running

npm install -g vsce

When this folder is initially cloned from a git repository, it is necessary to run

npm install

to appease the Microsoft software development demons. (It appears to create a necessary massive folder called "node_modules". I don't know what else it might be doing.)

Everything is installed. Now what?

Creating the VSIX extension installation file is accomplished by running

vsce package

The resulting cbl-dbg-x.x.x.vsix package needs to be installed on a user's system. This can be done by launching Visual Studio Code and displaying the Extensions pane (Ctrl+Shift+X), then clicking the three-dot "More actions" item, and then selecting "Install from VSIX...".

You can also get there via the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) and finding "Extensions: Install from VSIX...", which you can find by typing "VSIX".

It's also possible to install the VSIX package from the command line:

code --install-extension cbl-dbg-x.x.x.vsix

With the cbl-dbg extension installed and enabled, you need to look elsewhere for the cbl-dgb-template folder for the starting point for compiling and debugging actual COBOL code.

Oh, you want to do development on the extension?