Use Tanzu Developer Tools for Visual Studio

This topic tells you how to use VMware Tanzu Developer Tools for Visual Studio.

Note

This extension is in the beta stage of development.

Prerequisites

Ensure that you meet the following prerequisites:

• Tanzu CLI is installed in a location in your PATH environment variable.
• A valid workload.yaml file is in the project. For more information, see the specification for Tanzu apps workload apply.
• You have a functional Tanzu Application Platform environment.
• Your kubeconfig file is modified for Tanzu Application Platform workload deployments.
• You have an image repository to which source code in the local file system can be uploaded before Build Service builds it.

Configure Tanzu settings

To configure settings:

1. Right-click the Solution Explorer project.
2. Click Tanzu: Settings.

3. Confirm or enter the settings.

   

Apply a workload

To apply a workload:

1. Right-click the Solution Explorer project.
2. Click Tanzu: Apply Workload.
3. Output appears in the Tanzu Output pane of the Visual Studio Output tool window.

Delete a workload

To delete a workload:

1. Right-click the Solution Explorer project.
2. Click Tanzu: Delete Workload.
3. Output appears in the Tanzu Output pane of the Visual Studio Output tool window.

Use Live Update

To use Live Update:

1. Right-click the Solution Explorer project.
2. To Start Live Update, click Tanzu: Start Live Update.
3. To Stop Live Update, click Tanzu: Stop Live Update.

Use Remote Debug

1. Deploy a workload using Apply Workload or Live Update.
2. Right-click the Solution Explorer project.
3. Click Tanzu: Remote Debug.
4. Select your application pod from the prompted list.

Visual Studio establishes a debugging session with your remote application. A file named .tanzu-vs-launch-config.json is created in the root directory of your project. This file specifies the configuration needed to attach the Visual Studio debugger to the agent running in your workload’s container. It is only needed to initiate remote debugging and you can safely delete it at any time. This file location is temporary and will change in a future version.

Caution

Do not use the red square Stop button to end your debugging session. Doing so might cause the Tanzu Application Platform workload to fail. Instead, in the top menu click Debug > Detach All.

If the name of your running app process (the app DLL process), does not match the name of your .NET project as shown in the Visual Studio Solution Explorer, the remote debugging agent might fail to attach.

Access the extension log

The extension creates log entries in a file named tanzu-dev-tools.log. This file is in the directory where Visual Studio Installer installed the extension.

To find the log file, run:

C:> dir $Env:LOCALAPPDATA\Microsoft\VisualStudio\*\Extensions\*\tanzu-dev-tools.log

    Directory: C:\Users\...

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-a---           3/31/2023  1:07 PM           1668 tanzu-dev-tools.log