It my job it happens from time to time that customers asking me about doing an expert review by checking their source code. Sometimes I will get access to their git repository but mostly with very limited permissions (read access). But it can happen also that I will just receive a *.zip file containing all the source code.

When I was working on a review I had always to copy the file and line references my comments were related to — which can be quite exhausting. In the end, everything was landing in a good old Excel sheet which isn't leading in a good-looking report.

Another way to create a review would be to add code comments and create a pull/merge request at customers site. But in the end all my comments would be part of the code and probably never cleaned up.

So I was looking for a way to easily create code reviews that can be exported and delivered to the customer without copying file and line references manually. As I am used to work with Visual Studio Code, I thought to search for some appropriate extensions but I wasn't successful. In the end I decided: let's take the scepter and develop an extension by myself that will satisfy my and probably also your needs.

The result is my extensions vscode-code-review.

Features

You can simply install the extension via the Visual Studio Code Marketplace.

Once installed, it will add a new menu option called 'Code Review: Add Note' when being on an active file. When you click this menu, a view opens to the right side with a form where you can enter your notes. The notes will be stored by default in the file code-review.csv on the top level of your project. It includes automatically the relative file path as well as the cursor position and/or the marked text range(s).

When you finished your review, you can either process the .csv file by yourself and import it somewhere or generate an HTML report by using the extension (see GIF below).

You are also able to use an adjusted template for report generation. Check out all the options in my related Github repository.