The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) lets users run Linux environment directly on Windows without the need of a traditional virtual machine or dual-booting. The graphic below shows the steps we will take during the Walkthrough section of this post: Finally, the Visual Studio Code Server running inside of the WSL2 and has the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code Extension installed. Starting with the developer at the top, we then head down several layers – the developer’s machine that is running Windows, Visual Studio Code that is running on the Windows instance, followed by the Linux VM (WSL2) that is also running on the Windows instance. The following diagram depicts the overall solution. We are going to use the WSL 2 because as opposed to the WSL 1, which could not run the Docker Engine directly inside of the WSL, the WSL 2 is able to run the Docker Engine, thanks to it’s implementation of a real Linux kernel inside a lightweight virtual machine (VM).

This blog post will walk you through the steps required to set up VS Code to use the WSL 2 and AL2. On the developer side of the solution, VS Code combines the simplicity of a source code editor with developer-friendly features such as IntelliSense or code completion and debugging. Targeting AL2 allows a developer to gain the benefits associated with AL2 – support for the latest EC2 features as well as better performing workloads due to the tuned Linux kernel. When a developer needs to target Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) to run their code but they only have access to a Windows development environment, they can use the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Visual Studio Code (VS Code) to accomplish that.

Visual studio wsl2