Development

I have wrote about the installation of PowerShell Core in Linux Mint 18 yesterday. Today, I want to show you, how to install Visual Studio Code on Linux Mint 18. The installation is really easy:

1. Download the deb package
2. Install the deb package
3. Run Visual Studio Code

You can download the latest packages for Windows, Linux (deb and rpm, if you want even a tar ball), and Mac on the Visual Studio Code download page. Download the deb file. To install the package, open a Terminal window and run dpkg .

Beside my Lenovo X250, which is my primary working machine, I’m using a HP ProBook 6450b. This was my primary working machine from 2010 until 2013. With a 128 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM and the Intel i5 M 450 CPU, it is still a pretty usable machine. I used it mainly during projects, when I needed a second laptop (or the PC Express card with the serial port…). It was running Windows 10, until I decided to try Linux MInt. I used Linux as my primary desktop OS more than a decade ago. It was quite productive, but especially with laptops, there were many things that does not worked out of the box.

In December 2013, VMware made an christmas gift to the community by releasing pyVmomi. pyVmomi is a SDK that allows you to manage VMware ESXi and vCenter using Python and the VMware vSphere API. Nearly 18 months are past since then and pyVmomi has developed over time.

I’ve started to play around with Python, and I’ve written about the reasons in one of my last blog posts (Hey infrastructure guy, you should learn Python!).

I’m not a developer. I’m an infrastructure guy. All I ever needed was to write some scripts. Therefore, I never needed more than DOS batches, BASH/ CSH/ KSH, Visual Basic Script and nowadays PowerShell. So why should I learn another programming language?

One to rule them all?

I don’t think that there is a single programming language that is perfect for all use cases. The spread and acceptance of a language shows a positive correlation with the number of available frameworks, tools and libraries. That’s why I love the Microsoft PowerShell. Nearly all vendors offer a PowerShell module for their products (think about VMware PowerCLI, Rubrik, Veeam, DataCore and much more). The downside: The PowerShell code has to run on a Windows box. I think the time of writing DOS batches is over. UNIX shell scripts are still awesome, but focused on UNIX.

I’m not a developer. I deal mainly with infrastructe, things like virtualization, storage & backup, networking etc. Sometimes I had to write scripts, primarily PowerShell, batch or Bash. Many years back, I also wrote Csh and Ksh scripts. In the past years, automation was one of the rising trends in the infrastructure segment. And with automation, new challenges came up. Today I have to work with Windows PowerShell, in case of VMware with PowerCLI (which bases on Windows PowerShell), and sometimes I have use with REST APIs. I’m still not a developer. Due to this fact, I need tools that help me getting my work done.