Extension tip to bring Visual Studio Code to the foreground

In one of the extensions I am developing with a custom authentication provider, I required to bring the last Visual Studio Code instance to the front once signed in.

When you can control the full authentication flow, you typically redirect the user to vscode://..., which triggers your browser from opening Visual Studio Code.

In my case, I do not own the authentication flow but still wanted to give a similar experience to the developer, so I came up with the following trick:

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import { exec } from 'child_process'; 

function getWorkspaceFolder(): Promise<WorkspaceFolder | undefined> {
  let folder: WorkspaceFolder | undefined;

  if (!workspace.workspaceFolders || workspace.workspaceFolders.length === 0) {
    return undefined;
  } else if (workspace.workspaceFolders.length === 1) {
    folder = workspace.workspaceFolders[0];
  } else {
    folder = await window.showWorkspaceFolderPick({ placeHolder: `Select the workspace folder` });
    if (!folder) {
      return undefined;
    }
  }

  return folder;
}

const wsFolder = await getWorkspaceFolder();
exec(`code .`, { cwd: wsFolder?.uri.fsPath });

All the above code does is open the project again in Visual Studio Code. As the project/solution is already opened, it would not get reloaded. All it does is bring your Visual Studio Code instance to the front, which we needed.

Happy developing