Authoring Experience

Sahil Malik: Let’s look at the authoring experience for Azure Functions using VSCode. I’m on my dev machine here and I’ve already installed VSCode with a few extensions. Let me show you what it looks like. So go ahead and launch not Visual Studio but Visual Studio Code. And what I did is that I went ahead and installed a few extensions. Let me show you what extensions I have. So go ahead and install the Azure Functions extension which will also install the Azure Account extension for you. Go ahead and install the C# extension and the Debugger for Chrome extension. Once you have installed these extensions, you should see an icon here that says Azure. Go ahead and click on it.

Now when you click here, you might see a user experience saying “Sign in with an Azure Subscription”. I’ve already gone ahead and signed in here. If not, go ahead and sign in. But the idea here is right from here, you can manage your functions apps right from here. So I’ll show you that in a later video but for now, let’s go ahead and click this button here that says “Create a Project”. See there are four buttons here, so Create a Project, Create a Function, Deploy, or Refresh. So go ahead and start by clicking on create a new project. Pick a folder, pick a language. That will say it already created a project for me, it even get initialized it. Let’s see what it looks like.

So this looks like a functions project. Let’s come back here. Now click this button to create a new function. Point it to a folder where my function app is. Go ahead and pick any one of these. I’ll go with the simplest possible which is HttpTrigger. Give it a name. Give it an authentication level, and it generates the necessary code for you. Now you can start writing Azure Functions right through VSCode. And you get nice intellisense and text encoding and if you were to use C#, you’d be able to use that as well as long as you have the C# extension. And this is generally speaking how you can go about developing or creating a new project that contains Azure Functions using VSCode.