Cannot start bloc

Question

I am still trying to set up Visual Studio for solidity development. I am following this tutorial: https://medium.com/@ConsenSys/solidity-integration-with-visual-studio-8bdab2ff8a74#.35fbkvlae

I have Visual Studio 2015 Community and the solidity extension installed. I was able to download bloc, use "bloc init", "npm install", and "bloc genkey", but when I try "bloc start" nothing happens for about 30 seconds and then it just jumps into the next line without printing anything. It doesnt print "bloc is listening on 0.0.0.0:8000" as the tutorial describes.

Then when I try to deploy a sample contract in visual studio I get an error. My understanding is that Bloc is not properly running yet. How can I figure out if the bloc keyserver is actually running? And what can I do if bloc start doesn't work?

The screenshot below shows that bloc is only responding with a blank line(after the first line). I dont believe this is due to a wrong directory, because when I am in the wrong directory, I get a specific error message(after the third command line).

Thanks, Max

Answer 1

Make sure you start block in the correct project directory. You also do not need to use block genkey.

I should mention that at the moment the extension is not worth using.

The extension is using solidity version 0.1.6-d41f8b7c and basic solidity features like inheritance and modifiers are not supported by the block tool.

MS as aware of this issue but so far nothing has been updated.

I use this solidity extension for Visual Studio Code - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JuanBlanco.solidity.

You can then run a private test blockchain using Geth and use the solidity-browser to deploy to the private block test chain.