Because I am practising for the 70-533 exam I thought I could try to create some Azure JSON templates. For this I wanted to use Visual Studio Code. On the Azure documentation site there are some great examples to get you started.

After installing Visual Studio Code I installed the Azure Tools for Visual Studio Code. To install this extension:
– Open the extension view (CTRL-Shift-X) and type “Azure Tools”.
– Click on the green Install button
– activate the extension

In order to use the Azure: Login command go to File, Preferences, Settings and type the following between the curly brackets:
"azure.tenantId": "<your Azure tenant ID"

To retrieve your tenant ID login to the ARM portal and select the Azure Active Directory. Select App registrations and click on Endpoints. Copy the URL of the federation metadata document and strip out the first and last part so you end up with your tenant ID.
It looks like 12345678-abcd-1a23-a12b-1a2bc3defa4b

To logon do CTRL-P and type >azure. If al goes well you should see the following commands to choose from.

The first command you should use is Azure: Login. This will give you a code to fill in during the logon process similar like the Azure CLI logon process.

But you don’t have to do it from Visual Studio Code. You could also write your JSON template file, save it, and use it with powershell i.e. [code language=”powershell”]New-AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment -Name "MyDeployment" -ResourceGroupName "MyResourceGroup" -TemplateFile "MySavedJSONFile"[/code]