Visual Studio Code for Classic ASP coding?

I can’t quite believe I’ve been struggling without Visual Studio Code all this time when I’ve been supporting the classic ASP sites we still run.

Up until now I’ve been using the full version of Microsoft Visual Studio, hacking WinSCP to open the .asp files, and editing them there. It kind of works but often VS has a little fit and opens all the new files in new instances of itself, which is very slow and annoying. And syntax highlighting only kind of works for vbscript in general, and then HTML is messed up, or javascript, or, well, it’s a long, horrible mess.

So today I install VS Code for the first time, and then an extension right away, Classic ASP Syntaxes and Snippets, then edit WinSCP to load my .asp files there instead of into VS full:

Command to specify on Editor preferences dialog:

"%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Microsoft VS Code\Code.exe" !.!

Then test it out…

And there we go, we have full syntax highlighting. And that’s not all, we also have some snippets, for example:

Showing a simple for loop snippet which you can tab through and add values as usual.

For any of you poor people like me that still support classic ASP on a remote server somewhere, this might be just what you’re looking for!