Polacode

The Polacode extension can generate screenshots of your code in Visual Studio Code.

It's a great extension to get example code into a well formatted and nicely displayed image. Good for code snippets where you don't see a need for any copy or pasting. Also useful for putting screenshots into chat windows like skype or slack.

PlantUML

I'm a big fan of using PlantUML to generate technical diagrams on the fly using a text based dsl. I've previously written about deploying a PlantUML editor in a docker container and having a solution in Visual Studio Code gives me a neat offline ability to edit files too.

PlantUML  is one of a number of PlantUML extensions wrappers. This one by the author jebbs seemed to be the most downloaded which can be an indicator of a good extension. It certainly has a number of supported features including image generation and document formatting.

PlantUML documents can be recognised and edited if they have a supporting file extension such as *.puml

Those documents can then be exported as diagrams of various formats.

Installation notes

  • Install GraphViz by going to https://graphviz.gitlab.io/, download the *.msi and install
  • To install PlantUML go to http://plantuml.com/, download the JAR file and put in an easily accessible folder, such as C:\tools\plantuml\plantuml.1.2018.1.jar
  • Install the PlantUML extension through the Extension tab in Visual Studio Code and update your user settings to point at your latest PlantUML jar