Earlier this month, JetBrains released the Rider version for its AWS Toolkit, an IDE plugin aimed at helping developers to build, test and deploy serverless applications in the Amazon Web Services platform. This release also includes support for Node.JS (in WebStorm) and updates to its first version, available since March of this year for Java and Python developers using IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm, respectively.
The new release adds support for C# developers using Rider and features multiple helper functionalities such as a .NET Core project template for AWS Lambda applications, automatically created run configurations for Docker environments, and AWS credential and regions management tools.
An exciting feature contained in the new release is the Cloud Debugging functionality, which allows a developer to debug a .NET Core application on a Linux container while it's deployed in ECS. This functionality is currently available in beta in AWS, and it is a result of a joint effort between Amazon and JetBrains.
The plugin also contains a visual tool called AWS Explorer, similar to the one also present in the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. It allows the deployment and management of AWS Lambda functions and related AWS resources (such as creating S3 buckets to hold deployment artifacts). Support for AWS databases (such as RDS, Aurora, and RedShift) is provided by JetBrain's multi-database tool (DataGrip) and integrated into Rider.
Other features contained in the new release include the possibility of deploying AWS Lambda directly from the template.yaml file and gutter icons to run and debug Lambda handlers directly from either the C# file or from the CloudFormation configuration file.
Using AWS Toolkit with Rider requires the installation of Amazon's AWS CLI and AWS SAM CLI tools (you also need to have an AWS account, configured with the correct permissions required by the CLI tools). Docker is also required since it is used to run Lambda locally. Installing .NET Core 2.0 or 2.1 is also required by the plugin (even if your application targets .NET Core 3.0).
JetBrains's AWS Toolkit can be downloaded here for IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, Rider, and WebStorm. A complete tutorial on using the plugin with Rider can be found here, and the Cloud Debugging feature is detailed here. The plugin is open-sourced on GitHub.
