While it is possible to run Visual Studio Code on a Raspberry Pi or a NVIDIA Jetson, the process previously had a few challenges. With one method, a user could grab the code from Microsoft and compile it for their device. This was time consuming and required that a person perform some steps to be set up for development. An easier method involved acquiring a build from a third party source. The issue there is the user must trust the third party source. Now these are no longer issues because Microsoft provides ARM binaries for Visual Studio Code. The installation can be done on both devices with the same steps.

To install VS code, navigate to VisualStudio.com and click on the Learn More link on the Visual Studio Code box. From there, if you click on Other Platforms you will see all of the downloads that are available for Visual Studio Code. For the Jetson series of hardware you will want to download the ARM64 deb installer. For Raspberry Pi, if you are using the a 64-bit OS installation grab an ARM64 build. Otherwise grab the ARM build.

After the build has downloaded, open a terminal and navigate to the folder where you saved the ARM file. From the terminal type the following command.

sudo dpkg -i name_of_file.deb

An actual file name should replace name_of_file.deb. After a minute or two the installation completes. You can start VS Code from the command line by typing the command code and pressing Enter. You can also find it within your program files. Videos of the installation are available below.