Exploring the Visual Studio Code REST Book extension for native Notebooks

My co-worker Tanha Kabir has a cool Visual Studio Code extension called REST Book. Sure, there's lots of extensions and lots of ways to call REST APIs from Visual Studio Code - not to mention the command line.

However, REST Book is a Postman-like notebook that uses the Native Notebooks UI experience that's already built into Visual Studio code.

If you already love the concept of Notebooks like I do, you'll love REST Book. It's electric paper! Just like .NET Interactive or Jupyter Notebooks, it mixes Prose and Code in a very clean and very intuitive interface.

NOTE: Today the REST Book extension requires Visual Studio Code Insiders, but not for long. Get Insiders and run it side-by-side with a stable VS Code here.

Here's me calling into my Nightscout server to see my real-time Blood Glucose:

Pretty cool. It's early days but I think Tanha already has a very interesting combination of a native Notebook experience and a Postman-like experience. Note I've also created a "SECRET" in the form of my API Key, and then I can refer to it in the GET request using $SECRETS.name.

You can also assign variables like:

let foo = GET https://hanselman.com

and then use them in subsequent cells with $.foo.headers.User-Agent, etc.

Just install the Rest Book extesnion in VS Code Insiders, and make a new empty text file with a .restbook extension.

You can do GET and have the URL on multiple lines if you split on a ? or &

GET https://www.google.com

    ?query="hanselman"

    &page=2

User-Agent: rest-book

Content-Type: application/json 

And you can POST and each new line will be a Header, until the last lines after a line separator which is the body of the call.

POST https://www.myexampleapi.com

User-Agent: rest-book

Content-Type: application/json 



{

    name: "Hello",

    text: "Hi friends, how are you all?" 

}

If you want to get involved, look at the source, file an issue or bug, or just give compliments, do it over on her repository at https://github.com/tanhakabir/rest-book Have fun!

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