We are excited to announce the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) Toolkit for Visual Studio Code (beta). The toolkit is an extension for Visual Studio Code that makes it easier for you to develop and deploy Alexa skills. We also provide the source code under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub to enable you to customize it and contribute to the community.

Create, Update, Certify, and More, without Leaving the Development Environment

You can use the ASK extension to call the Alexa Skills Kit Command Line Interface (CLI) from within Visual Studio Code, and can see the results in an integrated terminal. This allows you to perform nearly all skill development actions within Visual Studio Code. For example, using the ASK extension, you can:

• Discover ASK commands by typing “ASK” from the VS Code command palette
• Create a skill using Alexa templates
• Generate code snippets for built-in intents, custom intents, slots, and request handlers
• Identify errors in your JSON schema
• Hover over a JSON object to see documentation
• Submit a skill for certification

Download the Toolkit and Give Us Your Feedback

You can visit our getting started guide for step-by-step instructions to help you install and use the toolkit, and can read about the full set of commands available in our documentation. You can install the ASK Toolkit extension from this link in the Visual Studio Code marketplace or by searching for 'Alexa' in the Visual Studio Code extensions tab. Once you’ve tried it, let us know what you think. You can provide feedback to help us improve the toolkit by clicking on ‘Contact Alexa’ in the Visual Studio Code status bar.

Build Skills, Earn Developer Perks

Bring your big idea to life with Alexa and earn perks through our milestone-based developer promotion. US developers, publish your first Alexa skill and earn a custom Alexa developer t-shirt. Publish a skill for Alexa-enabled devices with screens and earn an Echo Spot. Publish a skill using the Gadgets Skill API and earn a 2-pack of Echo Buttons. If you're not in the US, check out our promotions in Canada, the UK, Germany, Japan, France, Australia, and India. Learn more about our promotion and start building today.