[Roku Development] Debugging Roku Code - Visual Studio Code

For ease of debug instead of terminal we will use Visual Studio Code for Roku Channel development. Visual Studio Code download link is mentioned below

https://code.visualstudio.com

Once IDE is downloaded, we need to install extenstion for Roku Development available in VSC known as "BrightScript Language"

Step 1: Install BrightScript Language Extension

Once package is installed, open the project which you need to work upon

Step 2: Open Roku Channel Project

After opening the project goto Run and Debug option, since this is the first time we are opening this project we need to setup the environment. In this case we need to click on create a launch.json file

Step 3: Setup launch.json file

Once we click on create launch.json file, it will ask for which environment we want to setup the Run and Debug option. Here we need to choose BrightScript Debug option. 

Note that, BrightScript Debug option will be available under only if BrightScript Language extension is installed

Step 4: Enabling BrightScript Debug option

Once BrightScript Debug option is selected, launch.json file will be created inside project folder. There are various parameters present in the launch.json file. To avoid typing of username and password on every Run and Debug session, please make go ahead and change following parameters

host        "your-ip-address"
password    "your-roku-device-password"

Step 5: Editing launch.json file

Please note that host address should be like 192.168.87.99, no need to explicitly add http:// before the ip-address

Voila Run and Debug using VSC user interface. Also we can make use of Debug Console available as shown below to print the values of nodes or variables using commands - print, p or $

 

Debugging using VSC user interface

Special thanks to - https://github.com/rokucommunity, for bringing this extension and making life of Developer easy, :)

We would love to hear your thoughts or better approaches to debug. 

Please feel free to comment in case of any doubts or issues. Like always, Happy Coding!!! :)