Thursday, 20 November 2025

Dev Containers Extension in VS Code

What it is, What it does

The Dev Containers ("DC") extension is needed by Semantic Kernel in VS Code. It's worth expanding on its purpose here.

DC allows you to use a Docker container as a full-feature development environment (this is independent of how you deploy the thing).

More details here.

Dev Containers Dependencies

It requires Docker Desktop to be installed, which interacts with WSL2. If you don't have it, don't worry, however. VS Code will prompt you automatically to install it.  After installation, you will see a status bar labelled "Setting up Dev Containers" followed by "Connecting to Dev Container (show log)".

Dev Container Configuration

This is located in semantic-kernel\.devcontainer\devcontainer.json.  This is similar to launch.json for debugging configurations. More info here.

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