Microsoft has been investing a lot into the development of Blockchain based technology. Azure Blockchain is the cloud offering that’s part of making Enterprise Blockchain more approachable and easier to develop with Blockchain. Recently, Microsoft released the first Preview release of the new Azure Blockchain Development Kit for Ethereum, as an extension to Visual Studio Code.

This Visual Studio Code extension for Azure Blockchain provides developers an enhanced experience for building Blockchain apps utilizing Azure Blockchain Service, or even the public Ethereum network. It also enables you to utilize popular, open source Blockchain tools such as Solidity and Truffle.

Author, Build, and Deploy Solidity Smart Contracts from VS Code

Sure, there have been Solidity and other Blockchain technology extensions for Visual Studio Code published by others in the community, however now there is also an official set of tools published by Microsoft. This proves even further the investment and dedication that Microsoft is putting forth towards the use of Blockchain ledger technologies in the Enterprise, or even on the public blockchain networks.

You can find the “Azure Blockchain Development Kit for Ethereum” Visual Studio Code extension here:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=azblockchain.azure-blockchain

Since Visual Studio Code is cross platforms, so is this extension. This extension is supported on both Windows 10 and macOS. This offers flexibility in development for either of the two primary platforms you may be using as your local development machine. Or, you could also use Visual Studio Code and it’s extensions (including this one) running within a Virtual Machine in Azure; such as a “Visual Studio 2019 VM in Azure” as I’ve blogged about previously.

Additionally this extension has the following system requirements:

VS Code 1.32.0 (or greater)

Python 2.7.15

Node 10.15.x

Git 2.10.x

in the “open source development tool” theme that Microsoft has been adhering to in recent time, the “Azure Blockchain Development Kit” extension for Visual Studio Code is Open Source and hosted on GitHub. In addition to using the extension to develop Blockchain solutions, you can also contribute to the extension by submitting pull requests or reporting issues.

You can go check out the source code for the extension at the GitHub project site, here:

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-azure-blockchain-ethereum

I hope this extension helps you develop your Blockchain, Solidity, or Ethereum solutions!

Article Author

Chris Pietschmann Chris is the Founder of Build5Nines.com and a Microsoft MVP in Azure & IoT with 20 years of experience designing and building Cloud & Enterprise systems. He is also a Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect, developer, Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), and Cloud Advocate. He has a passion for technology and sharing what he learns with others to help enable them to learn faster and be more productive.