Every so often, you may need to debug an issue that only appears in the 32bit version of VS Code but you’re running 64bit Windows. To get a local build of the 32bit VS Code that you can debug, do the following:

1. Follow the regular contributing guide and make sure you can get the 64bit version of VS Code running locally.
2. Stop any running processes from the regular contributing guide.
3. Start a PowerShell session in the vscode directory that you cloned.
4. run git clean -fdx – remove downloaded election, remove node_modules, remove anything that isn’t checked in to the repo
5. run $env:npm_config_arch = 'ia32' – let npm know that you want to build the 32bit version
6. run npm i – install dependencies
7. run npm run electron ia32 – download the 32bit of electron
8. run .\scripts\code.bat – start VS Code

You should be able to go into the About section and see that you’re running the 32bit version of VS Code.

From here, everything else works the same (i.e. “Launch VS Code” task in codebase, Build task, etc).