Post by Jan-Erik SöderholmHi.
I have been looking throught the VSI Wiki about VMS-IDE.
I have VS Code installed (and I have worked with many
differnt IDE's before and know Windows fairly well).
Now, I cannot follow the Wiki instruktions to get a simple
example VMS-IDE setup working. Has anyone (outside VSI)
managed to get a working VMS-IDE setup to work? And if so,
did you find the Wiki guides clear and easy to follow?
I cannot really describe where I get lost since I find the
Wiki to be a major mess without a clear line to follow.
Just a large bunch of links to different pages, but no
simple step by step list of the setup events to perform.
And besides, if you did get it to work, did you find that
it was worth the effort?
I was skeptical of your skepticism when I saw this post, but I just
spent an hour fussing with it before I finally got it to work. I use
VSCode all the time with various extensions on both macOS and Windows
and this one was a bit of a challenge. You really do need to watch all
4 of the instructional videos starting with this one:
The videos are short, which is convenient in some ways, but also makes
them a bit sketchy. It is difficult to know whether things like
particular folder names are mandatory or are just examples of something
that could vary.
Here are a couple of gotchas I eventually got past.
When I tried to upload the project I ran into the usual nightmare of
trying to connect to VMS via SSH with current algorithms. I added the
following to the settings file:
"vmssoftware.ssh-helper.connection.algorithms": {
"kex": [
"diffie-hellman-group1-sha1"
],
"serverHostKey": [
"ssh-dss",
"ssh-rsa"
]
},
and that did get me past the initial connection problems. I never did
get key exchange to work with the same key I use to log in all the time,
but password authentication did work. The error with key exchange was:
Cannot parse privateKey: Encrypted OpenSSH private key detected, but no
passphrase given
There is nowhere to enter a passphrase and it apparently does not have
the ability to query the agent that already has it loaded.
Another wrinkle was that in the settings file, the line that looks like:
"vmssoftware.synchronizer.project.source": "*.{c,cpp}",
has to be modified to add whatever source extensions you want if you are
not doing C or C++. I was testing with a simple Fortran program, which
initially did not get selected for inclusion in the generated MMS file
and did not get uploaded, so I had to change "*.{c,cpp}" to "*.{c,cpp,for}".
Until I figured out that it had not identified my source file, building
just gave me this:
%DCL-W-INSFPRM, missing command parameters - supply all required parameters
%MMS-F-ABORT, For target [.out.DEBUG]vmsidetest.EXE, CLI returned abort
status: %X00038048.
-CLI-W-INSFPRM, missing command parameters - supply all required parameters
which turns out to be a link command with no command parameter. There
was no way to debug that other than reading the generated MMS file and
understanding what it was trying to do and why it couldn't do it. I can
do that, but I'm not sure the target audience can.
Once things were set up right, running the debugger from VSCode was more
pleasant than the alternatives. There is a lot of potential here, but
expect some hours of configuration time for a project of any complexity.
I will say it is much nicer and more performant than the old NetBeans IDE.