When using Azure Runbooks, you can work on your changes through the built-in online IDE or you have the choice of editing them via VS Code.

When you edit in VS Code you will be immediately prompted to install the Azure Automation extension that will enable you to connect to your runbooks and edit them.

After authenticating to Azure, you will see all of your runbooks where you can now edit them inline with VS Code (and test locally via your own Powershell editor).

What’s great about this integration is that you can easily create, upload, and publish runbooks directly from VSCode, thereby having no need to log into Azure which greatly simplifies your development process in building code.

Previously I had been using the Portal IDE as I got started with Runbooks but now I and finding myself more and more switching to using VS Code for its simplicity in operations.