Documentation:MPFB2 getting started with VS code

MPFB2 getting started with VS code

On this page you will find notes, tips and hints - in general I intend to make notes on how MPFB2 was implemented as I learn and hopefully this can help others to understand the addon, debut it, make extensions/suggestions and perhaps you can even learn how to make your own addon?

Getting started

As of now VS code - actually Visual Studio Code - will be refereed to as VSC. For your information VSC is a free version of the professional tool called Visual Studio, Both are provided by Microsoft. Visual Studio is used by companies that have a portfolio of software and it is often used as a front end for different repository systems, this is needed when you have complex systems and a need for keeping track of software versions. If you use VSC you will learn a bit... but never mind, lets get to the first issue you may run into.

The very first issue!!

Getting Blender running from VSC, you need to open the folder in VSC and ctrl-shift-p and select the runtime - in my case D:\Blender\stable\blender-2.92.0-windows64\blender.exe - but if you do this like I did you will just see Blender start up and then pass-away. if you are new to VSC you may not notice that there is a message about this on the console - the operative part is: PermissionError:. This rather meaningless, however but what happen is that did already install the addon with this Blender version 2.92.0... and in short you need to unload and uninstall the addon you want to run/debug in VSC.

This is what Blender should look like when running from VSC - I highlighted tree things:

   It looks like 2.9.2 (or perhaps MBPF2) adds collections to the Scene: Mesh/Rig/Collision/Extras.
   When running from VSC you will get a extra DEV tool-tab, this is good to know i you are running Blender both ways.
   When running from VSC the add on gets installed and it will be installed as is, when you run (the same) Blender without VSC.