Using dotnet interactive inside VS Code

I try to be a strict note taker throughout my day-to-day work life. Whether those are minute from a meeting or recording the results of an investigation. I have been using markdown for this purpose as it is lightweight and I can easily follow the syntax to achieve an outcome that I desire.

More recently I have found that I tend to record/calculate results or have to dig quite deep in some code in order to investigate an issue. For this I have ended up writing no end of Console applications. While it works and can be easy to debug for relatively straightforward code investigations it can be a pain to setup. I have always like the concept of Jupiter notebooks but never bothered to set it up.

I have now discovered that it is possible to create a Jupiter style notebook from within Visual Studio Code using dotnet interactive and a handy little extension .NET Interactive Notebooks. At the time of writing this the extension is still in preview however I have not hit any issues so far.

The steps to setting your tooling up are pretty simple:

1. Install the latest Visual Studio Code.
2. Install the latest .NET 5 SDK
3. Install the .NET Interactive Notebooks extension from the marketplace.

Once set up you can easily get going by creating sections of code or markdown.

Pretty cool right?