This post demonstrates some of my favorite search techniques that work well in VSCode, including some basic RegEx (Regular Expressions) expressions that will help you find exactly what you’re looking for in an unfamiliar code base. We will cover VSCode file type inclusions and exclusions, single-line multi-term searching, conditional searching, and more. RegEx can be intimidating to people who aren’t used to using it, but luckily the RegEx expressions described in this post are very easy to remember and incredibly powerful.
Remote Development With Visual Studio Code Remote – SSH
Does your personal laptop struggle to keep up with your development needs? Maybe your company is looking for alternatives to continually needing to upgrade their developers’ laptops. Maybe a team of developers would benefit from a powerful remote server versus personal computers?
Today, remote development is even more streamlined than ever with the help of products like Visual Studio’s Remote – SSH extension or with Jetbrains Remote Development. In this blog post, I will give a brief overview of Visual Studio’s Remote – SSH extension and share a mini how-to on using it.
VS Code’s Development Container: A Stepping Stone To IaC
In this post, l explain how we used Visual Studio Code’s Development Container feature as a stepping stone in our long-term effort to achieve Collaborative Infrastructure as Code. This one step in the process gave a versioned, repeatable working environment and allowed us time to determine the next steps in the effort to achieve IaC.
Refactoring: Ugly Code That Does Everything
If you’ve been writing code for a significant amount of time, you’re sure to have seen the—anything but godly—“God Method.” It’s a method that performs way too many processes in the system and has grown beyond all realistic logic to become “The Method That Does Everything.”
This single unsightly method can span dozens, if not hundreds, of lines. Sometimes even over 1,000! This type of “ugly code” is an unbearable beast to maintain. This is why it’s considered a “code smell” or anti-pattern.
In this tutorial, we walk through a tangible “God Method” and step through the process to refactor it into something more manageable and human-readable. Our code is written in JavaScript for a Node.js service, but the principles apply to any language.
Java Development Using Visual Studio Code
Over the last few years, I have worked on several .NET and JavaScript projects. My go-to IDE for Angular, Node, and (in starting to learn) React has been Visual Studio Code, along with Visual Studio Enterprise for C#.
Recently, I started on a new team and project that was in Java. Our initial thought was to switch back over to Spring Tool Suite or IntelliJ. But, there are some really good extensions now for Java in VS Code that made that transition unnecessary. So we decided to take a look at what Visual Studio code could do for us – we were very pleasantly surprised!
In this post, I provide links and information to get you started down the right path for Java in Visual Studio Code.





