I’ve recently been using using Visual Studio Code to interface with remote Github Codespaces when developing data models. Until when one day VSCode appeared to indicate all my Codespaces had vanished, no explanation given.

It turns out that I needed to update my VSCode version. This hadn’t occurred to me as I thought I had it set to auto-update. Which the settings indicate it I had but yet for some reason it hadn’t updated for several months. Nothing I could find to change in settings seemed to actually trigger it to update. There was also no “Check for updates” option in the menu.

A light bit of Googling suggests this is maybe something to do with Windows and admin mode, although I don’t feel inclined to dig further.

Here’s how you can update VS Code in these situations. I just copied and pasted this from a colleague so don’t intend to try and explain it. But all you have to do is open a Windows command prompt and type

winget upgrade --id Microsoft.VisualStudioCode

and an updated VS Code will download and install.

winget is a built-in package management tool to some versions of Windows 10 and 11 that helps with installing and upgrading applications. If you didn’t know the –id for VSCode you could have found it by running:

winget search vscode