A scratchpad C++ project I can use to hack together some C++ to do things. I plan to use VS Code and related extensions to build/debug.
Visual Studio Code needs to use the MSVC C/C++ compiler (and debugger) that is installed separately from Visual Studio Code. That compiler/environment does not get added to the PATH. Instead, a user needs to launch Visual Studio Code from the 'Developer Command Prompt for VS 2022' that is included in the MSVC installer:
cd <repo root>
code .