For people who want to contribute to the C extension, how do we test changes locally?

[Hamir (hirehamir)]

For people who want to contribute to the C extension, how do we start the extension on our local devices in development mode?

For example, usually we can press F5 to test some Visual Studio extension locally. In which directory would we press F5 to test our local changes for the C extension?

[Sean McManus (sean-mcmanus)]

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/tree/main/Extension from https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/blob/main/Documentation/Building%20the%20Extension.md from https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-cpptools/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md .

But FYI, the main branch assumes a binary from 1.8.1.

[Sean McManus (sean-mcmanus)]

Prior to 1.8.0, our extension would automatically download offline binaries, but we've stopped publishing those.

You can get the 1.8.2 binaries from installing the extension and then copying the binaries. Are you able to get that working?

[Hamir (hirehamir)]

I believe that did the trick! Thanks for taking the time to clarify this. I expanded Documentation/Building the Extension.md in #8788 to hopefully help any future developers who might bump into this issue.

[Jomin (JominL)]

Is the bin/cpptools close source?

[Joshua (JoshuaCF)]

Prior to 1.8.0, our extension would automatically download offline binaries, but we've stopped publishing those.

You can get the 1.8.2 binaries from installing the extension and then copying the binaries. Are you able to get that working?

I want to use the language server of the extension with Neovim in WSL. Is there not a URL somewhere I can just download directly from?

[Bob Brown (bobbrow)]

Is the bin/cpptools close source?

Yes.

I want to use the language server of the extension with Neovim in WSL. Is there not a URL somewhere I can just download directly from?

Our language server binaries are not licensed to be used outside of the Visual Studio family of products. You can download them if you are contributing to the open source TypeScript portion of the code, but they aren't licensed to be used in a vim extension.