In this tutorial, you configure Visual Studio Code to use the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler and debugger on Windows.

After configuring VS Code, you will compile and debug a simple Hello World program in VS Code. This tutorial does not teach you details about the Microsoft C++ toolset or the C++ language. For those subjects, there are many good resources available on the Web.

If you have any problems, feel free to file an issue for this tutorial in the VS Code documentation repository.

To successfully complete this tutorial, you must do the following:

Install Visual Studio Code.

Install the C/C++ extension for VS Code. You can install the C/C++ extension by searching for 'c++' in the Extensions view (鈬р寴X (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+X)).

Install the Microsoft Visual C++ (MSVC) compiler toolset.

If you have a recent version of Visual Studio, open the Visual Studio Installer from the Windows Start menu and verify that the C++ workload is checked. If it's not installed, then check the box and select the Modify button in the installer.

You can also install the Desktop development with C++ workload without a full Visual Studio IDE installation. From the Visual Studio Downloads page, scroll down until you see Tools for Visual Studio under the All Downloads section and select the download for Build Tools for Visual Studio 2022.

This will launch the Visual Studio Installer, which will bring up a dialog showing the available Visual Studio Build Tools workloads. Check the Desktop development with C++ workload and select Install.

Note: You can use the C++ toolset from Visual Studio Build Tools along with Visual Studio Code to compile, build, and verify any C++ codebase as long as you also have a valid Visual Studio license (either Community, Pro, or Enterprise) that you are actively using to develop that C++ codebase.

To use MSVC from a command line or VS Code, you must run from a Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio. An ordinary shell such as PowerShell, Bash, or the Windows command prompt does not have the necessary path environment variables set.

To open the Developer Command Prompt for VS, start typing 'developer' in the Windows Start menu, and you should see it appear in the list of suggestions. The exact name depends on which version of Visual Studio or the Visual Studio Build Tools you have installed. Select the item to open the prompt.

You can test that you have the C++ compiler, cl.exe, installed correctly by typing 'cl' and you should see a copyright message with the version and basic usage description.

If the Developer Command Prompt is using the BuildTools location as the starting directory (you wouldn't want to put projects there), navigate to your user folder (C:\users\{your username}\) before you start creating new projects.

Note: If for some reason you can't run VS Code from a Developer Command Prompt, you can find a workaround for building C++ projects with VS Code in Run VS Code outside a Developer Command Prompt.

From the Developer Command Prompt, create an empty folder called "projects" where you can store all your VS Code projects, then create a subfolder called "helloworld", navigate into it, and open VS Code (code) in that folder (.) by entering the following commands:

The "code ." command opens VS Code in the current working folder, which becomes your "workspace". As you go through the tutorial, you will see three files created in a .vscode folder in the workspace:

In the File Explorer title bar, select the New File button and name the file helloworld.cpp.

Now paste in this source code: