Using Visual Studio Code as a development environment

Visual Studio Code is lightweight development environment that supports cross-platform, open source development seamlessly. Visual Studio Code can be downloaded from the same location as Visual Studio 2017. ARM templates files, the Azure SDK, and PowerShell modules are not automatically installed as these were with Visual Studio Azure development module; they need to be downloaded and installed separately.

Azure PowerShell modules can be installed manually by downloading them from https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/downloads/. They can also be installed using the PowerShellGet module if you are using PowerShell 5.0 or newer. The command for installing Azure PowerShell module using PowerShellGet is Install-Module -Name AzureRM.

The Azure ARM template extension can be installed in Visual Studio Code using the following steps:

1. Open the extensions pane in Visual Studio Code by pressing Ctrl + Shift + X
2. Type Azure Resource Manager Tools and click on the Install button:

It will take few seconds to install the ARM template development extension. This extension provides IntelliSense and other developer productivity features.

For this book, we will use Visual Studio 2017 to create our first ARM template; however, before writing our first ARM template, it's good to understand the overall structure of an ARM template.