Restore "with args" to the launch.json options for PowerShell

Prerequisites

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Summary

Sometime after ec53532bcf856725e1c763068122131aa949eb50, PowerShell Launch Current File w/Args Prompt was removed from launch.json.

That useful way of specifying args to a script being tested hasn’t been replaced or updated since. Running the script and getting a prompt for Mandatory = $true parms just isn’t the same. And who wants to specify args in launch.json itself?

It’s a pain to keep coming back to the repo to find the syntax for w/Args Prompt because I have too much else to remember.

Can we please put this back into launch.json?

I miss it.

Proposed Design

Put back a few lines of JSON code into launch.json that were summarily removed for some reason that’s probably lost to history.

[rkeithhill]

Back in the day, I implemented this feature #707. The configurationSnippet in question is:

          {
            "label": "PowerShell: Launch - Current File w/Args Prompt",
            "description": "Launch current file (in active editor window) under debugger, prompting first for script arguments",
            "body": {
              "type": "PowerShell",
              "request": "launch",
              "name": "PowerShell Launch Current File w/Args Prompt",
              "script": "^\"\\${file}\"",
              "args": [],
              "cwd": "^\"\\${file}\""
            }
          },

Originally we put this in the configurationSnippets & initialConfigurations fields under debuggers in the package.json. But the VSCode team complained that the PowerShell extension offered too many debug configurations by default - see #1611. So they asked us to whittle down the defaults in package.json and provide additional debug configuration via the provideDebugConfigurations provider, which I did in #2084.

When we determined what would be in the dynamic debug config list we decided to whittle the list down a bit realizing that all w/args Prompt required was the user modifying the “args” property like so:

"args": [ "${command:SpecifyScriptArgs}" ],

It’s even in the tooltip for args:

That said, I have no objections to adding this launch config back in.

[msftbot[bot]]

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