Aws Visual Studio Toolkit For Mac

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Today we’re going to get our development environment setup to use AWS for programming. We’re going to set it up for use with Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition.

AWS can be installed to work with older versions of Visual Studio, all the way back to 2008. If you’re still using Visual Studio 2005 or earlier, march into your boss’s office and tell him/her that he’s/she’s cheap and needs to buy you a tool built in the last decade.

It can also be used with newer versions of Visual Studio. The procedure I cover here will work for Visual Studio 2015, but Visual Studio 2017 (and possibly newer ones) will use a different method, and we’ll cover those in a separate post.

Step 1: Making Sure Visual Studio Is Up To Date

The first step is to make sure you know what version of Visual Studio you’re running, and making sure you’re up to date.

Open Visual Studio 2013

Choose Help > About Microsoft Visual Studio

You should see the following:

Awesome, we’re using Update 5, which at the time of this posting is the current version.

Next, let’s make sure Visual Studio doesn’t need any updates. It sure would be convenient if Microsoft would include a “Check for Updates” button here, but they don’t.

So close that screen, and then go to “Tools > Extensions and Updates …”, then click the Updates tab on the left, and check what is needed for Product Updates.

Great, Visual Studio still wants me to install a Windows Phone 8.1 Emulator (I’ll pass), but there’s nothing critical for Visual Studio itself. So we’re good. Close Visual Studio.

Step 2: Download the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2013

Ok, so let’s go get the AWS Toolkit from Amazon.

Navigate your favorite browser to: https://aws.amazon.com/visualstudio/

You’ll see the following on the right hand side:

Click on AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2013-2015

This should take about 30 seconds to download (thanks Comcast). It’s in .MSI format, so click on it to run it. Make sure Visual Studio is closed.

You’ll see the following:

Yay, a Wizard. Click Next.

You’ll get the End-User License Agreement (EULA) for three products: AWS SDK for .NET, AWS Toolkit, and AWS Tools for Windows Powershell. Cool, three products for the pain of installing one. Print them if you want and click to accept the terms and click Next.

Here you will see the products being installed. They are as follows:

AWS SDK for .NET – Versions 3, 2, and 1 in location “C:Program FilesAWS SDK for .NET”
AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell in location “C:Program FilesAWS ToolsPowerShell”
AWS CodeCommit Credentials Helper in a secret location
AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio in location “C:Program FilesAWS Toolkit”

The Toolkit includes Visual Studio 2013 support as well as Standalone Deployment support.

Hmm, the Visual Studio 2013 part indicates this is for Professional Edition and above. Let’s try it anyway with the Community edition.

Go ahead and click Next.

Great, a screen with not much purpose, go ahead and click “Install”.

This took about 5 minutes. I was installing it on my old ASUS ROG laptop I bought about 8 years ago. I wanted to be able to document a clean install experience. It’s a great little computer that I still use to game when I’m on the road. I was going to get a newer computer, but then I discovered Gaming in the Cloud, which we will cover in a future post. In any case, hopefully your install time is less.

And you’re done! Hopefully the whole process for you tool 10 minutes or less.

Step 3: Set Up An Appropriate User And Get Credentials

Ok, so best practices indicate we should use an account with appropriate permissions for our programming task. We will use this for a lot of tasks, but it doesn’t make sense to use an admin access account. So let’s create an account in AWS for a new zombie programmer user named “Michael”.

If you need help adding a new user, take a look at Securing Your Brand New AWS Account.

Let’s go ahead and assign him “Programmatic access”

Let’s create a new group for him called “Programmer1” and assign him access based on the Job Function filter. We’ll choose PowerUserAccess, which provides him access to a whole bunch of stuff, but not to User or Group management.

Visual Studio Aws Sdk

Once the user is created, pause for a moment on the Step 4: Success screen

Let’s go ahead and make sure we download the .csv file that contains his information.

So Michael won’t be able to login to the AWS console, but he will have access to AWS using the programming SDK. I’m not sure how I feel about that, since Michael’s talents were musical and he wasn’t well known as a programmer. Still, if he can learn to program, anyone can, so we’ll go with it.

Step 4: Create An AWS Profile

Ok, with our power user Michael created, let’s go ahead and launch Visual Studio 2013.

Ok, so for me, Visual Studio launched and opened with a window prompting me to add my AWS credentials to Visual Studio. Your experience may vary based on whether you have set up your Visual Studio environment to do something specific on launch.

For the Profile Name, I’m going to keep it associated with Michael’s account, so I’ll call mine “Michael”.

Next I want to import the account information, so I’ll click on the “Import from .csv file…” button.

</div><table><tbody><tr><td><div><div>2</div><div>4</div><div>6</div><div>8</div><div>10</div></div></td><td><div><div><span><</span><span>configuration</span><span>></span></div><div><span><</span><span>add</span><span>key</span><span>=</span><span>'AWSProfileName'</span><span>value</span><span>=</span><span>'Michael'</span><span>/</span><span>></span></div><div><span><</span><span>/</span><span>appSettings</span><span>></span></div><div><span><</span><span>supportedRuntime</span><span>version</span><span>=</span><span>'v4.0'</span><span>sku</span><span>=</span><span>'.NETFramework,Version=v4.5'</span><span>/</span><span>></span></div><div><span><</span><span>/</span><span>configuration</span><span>></span></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p>So it looks like it is pulling in the credential information I included when I set up the Michael profile. We’ll look at that further in another post.</p><p>It also created a starter Program.cs file. I take a look at it, and …</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/uvnRff0j9wc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><p>Uh oh, squiggles. Something is wrong. Just to verify, I try to build:</p><p>Yep, there’s a problem.</p><p>I look at the References section under my Solution Explorer, and it looks like it can’t find the AWSSDK assemblies.</p><p>Yep, I am betting that it just doesn’t know where they are.</p><p>As you’ll recall, we installed the Amazon SDK in “C:Program FilesAWS SDK for .NET”. Navigating there, it looks like all the assemblies are in the bin/Net45 assembly. I’ll go ahead and replace all four of the assemblies with ones found in that directory.</p><p>To do this, I right-click on References in the Solution Explorer, choose “Add Reference”, and then choose Browse on the left. I click the Browse button towards the lower right, and then navigate to the “C:Program FilesAWS SDK for .NETbinNet45” directory.</p><p>I choose all four of the missing references:</p><ul><li>AWSSDK.Core</li><li>AWSSDK.EC2</li><li>AWSSDK.S3</li><li>AWSSDK.SimpleDB</li></ul><p>Yay, the squiggles are gone. I do a build. Eureka! No errors.</p><p>I try to run it…and bomb!</p><div><textarea readonly='>An unhandled exception of type 'System.IO.FileNotFoundException' occurred in SNSListTopics.exe Additional information: Could not load file or assembly 'AWSSDK.EC2, Version=3.3.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=885c28607f98e604' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

2	An unhandled exception of type'System.IO.FileNotFoundException'occurred inSNSListTopics.exe Additional information:Could notload file orassembly'AWSSDK.EC2, Version=3.3.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=885c28607f98e604'orone of its dependencies.The system cannot find the file specified.

Really? C’mon AWS, throw me a bone here!

I do a little Google work, and switch my assemblies to set “Copy Local” to True.

To do this, select each of the AWS assemblies under References, then for the properties of that assembly, choose the Copy Local dropdown and change it to “True”.

With that, I click “Start” again to run the application.

Finally!

So with that, we finally have a programmatic connection to AWS!

Summary

AWS sure didn’t make the final stages easy, but I was highly impressed with how easy it was to add a profile to Visual Studio.

In future posts, we’ll write our own version of the Hello World program for our SNS services we have already created.

Active4 months ago

Is there a way I can install AWS Toolkit For Visual Studio 17 on MAC?

Aws Visual Studio Toolkit

I downloaded the toolkit from https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AmazonWebServices.AWSToolkitforVisualStudio2017. If I open it with Visual Studio, it opens the file as a text editor.

I downloaded Visual Studio Community Edition from https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/

Lex Li

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AsdfgAsdfg

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2 Answers

Currently the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio does not support Visual Studio for Mac. See below:

Chris DeckChris Deck

Open your VS Code and go to 'Extensions' on the left hand side and click on it. Search for AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code. Once you find it, it's a fairly straightforward process to install it!

Ghulam MohiuddinGhulam Mohiuddin