Every time I have started a new job it presents an amazing opportunity to rebuild my working environment, but I also have a new set of rules and potential limitations to work through. I have a standard list of applications that are a MUST have for me to function on a day-to-day basis. The very first thing I do when I get my new laptop or workstation is to install the following.

• Visual Studio Code
• Windows Terminal
• WSL (Ubuntu)
• Latest version of powershell
• Azure CLI
• Azure cmdlets
• Windows Git

I truly love Visual Studio Code; it quickly became the scripting IDE that I had been looking for all of my career. I started with Notepad back in VBScript days, migrated to a paid 3rd party tool that mirrored visual studio with a couple cool features and eventually played around with PowerShell ISE. They never seemed to work the way I wanted but Visual Studio Code was great from the start, and it also seems like every time I turn around there is another extension that adds extra functionality.

Must have Extensions:

• GitHub Copilot
• Rainbow CSV
• Bracket Pair Colorization
• Powershell
• Prettier

Handy Extensions depending on the job:

• Bicep
• Azure Terraform
• Docker
• ARM
• Azure (basically all of them)
• Kubernetes
• Github (actions and others)

All I can say about Windows Terminal is – about damn time!! A true command prompt of this millennia – powerful and customizable. It seems that every time I “meet” someone they use it differently and that makes their experience unique. I learn something new about it every time. 

Links on how to customize: 

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/tutorials/custom-prompt-setup
• https://ohmyposh.dev/docs/themes

I was also going to talk about local administrator permissions and how you need them to effectively get your job done, but I am going to save that for my next post.