CONTRIBUTING.md

How to Contribute Changes

Contribution Steps

• Build and debug the extension.
• File an issue and a pull request with the change and we will review it.
• If the change affects functionality, add a line describing the change to CHANGELOG.md.
• Try and add a test in test/extension.test.ts.
• Run tests via opening the Extension folder in Visual Studio Code, selecting the "Launch Tests" configuration in the Debug pane, and choosing "Start Debugging".

About the Code

• Execution starts in the activate method in main.ts.
  • processRuntimeDependencies handles the downloading and installation of the OS-dependent files. Downloading code exists in packageManager.ts.
  • downloadCpptoolsJsonPkg handles the cpptools.json, which can be used to enable changes to occur mid-update, such as turning the intelliSenseEngine to "Default" for a certain percentage of users.
• The debugger code is in the Debugger folder.
• LanguageServer/client.ts handles various language server functionality.
• LanguageServer/configurations.ts handles functionality related to c_cpp_properties.json.
• telemetry.ts: Telemetry data gets sent to either logLanguageServerEvent or logDebuggerEvent.
• The Tag Parser (symbol database) doesn't automatically expand macros, so the cpp.hint file contains definitions of macros that should be expanded in order for symbols to be parsed correctly.

String Localization

• vscode-nls is used to localize strings in TypeScript code. To use vscode-nls, the source file must contain:

import * as nls from 'vscode-nls';

nls.config({ messageFormat: nls.MessageFormat.bundle, bundleFormat: nls.BundleFormat.standalone })();
const localize: nls.LocalizeFunc = nls.loadMessageBundle();

• For each user-facing string, wrap the string in a call to localize:

const readmeMessage: string = localize("refer.read.me", "Please refer to {0} for troubleshooting information. Issues can be created at {1}", readmePath, "https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-cpptools/issues");

• The first parameter to localize should be a unique key for that string, not used by any other call to localize() in the file unless representing the same string. The second parameter is the string to localize. Both of these parameters must be string literals. Tokens such as {0} and {1} are supported in the localizable string, with replacement values passed as additional parameters to localize().