Visual Studio Code at Connect(); 2017

November 15, 2017 Sean McBreen, @nz_sean

On the day of our annual developer conference (tune in here if you missed it), we thought it would be cool to reflect on a few things highlighted today and touch on some things that have happened for Visual Studio Code in the last 12 months, for example:

Over 15,000 of you contributed to VS Code, making us the #1 project in the 2017 GitHub Octoverse.
More than 2,600,000 people use VS Code every month, up by over 160% in the last year.

We have come a long way and a big reason is the amazing support we have from the community. We'd like to start with a big THANK YOU!

Announcements and news from Connect();

At this year's Connect(); event, you'll see VS Code in the keynote, in general sessions, and in plenty of on-demand content.

Here are a few highlights:

Visual Studio Live Share We showed a glimpse of the future with real-time collaborative editing and debugging in both VS Code and VS IDE - no need to clone a repo, copy code or configuration anything. Find out more on the Visual Studio Live Share page.
Java and Python support - We're getting serious about Python and Java for VS Code by staffing full time teams. There was a nice demo of this support in the Visual Studio General Session showing debugging of an Azure Java Function and running Python unit tests.
Debugging inside containers - Containerized development is a great way to replicate your production environment, and work on multiple projects while keeping your development environment clean. With the Docker extension, you can run docker-compose and automatically connect VS Code's debugger to a Node.js app running inside the container.
Work with Azure - There are now extensions for many Azure services, making tasks like deploying web apps, managing container registries and images, and working with databases a lot simpler.
Visual Studio Code 1.18 - This was a big release. We crossed off several of the most requested features, such as: Multi-root workspaces, Git status in the Explorer, vertical panel positioning, auto-imports, several performance improvements, and more. See the release notes for details.

There was a lot of VS Code activity at Connect(); but as we look back at the last 12 months, we also feel good about our pace in improving VS Code.

The community and VS Code

Many of the new features have come from the community; through issues, pull requests, and though the creation of Extensions. We have seen a huge amount of progress and again we want to say THANK YOU!

We processed over 2,300 PRs.
We closed over 30,000 issues.
There are now more than 4,700 published extensions.

A sampling of features across the last 12 months

In each monthly release, we've added features and improvements that we hope you love. Across the last 12 months, there's been a lot of them but here is a small sampling...

Roadmap

Release	Features	Foundation
October 2017	Multi-root workspaces Vertical panel layout Inline Git change review Auto-import JS/TS	Improved Windows Cold start Decoration optimizations Improved recommendations
September 2017	Support for multiple SCM repos Region folding Import Suggestions	macOS touch bar support Terminal performance improvements
August 2017	HTML auto-tag close HTML/CSS color picker JS/TS Refactoring – Extract Method
July 2017	Emmet 2.0 Support Loaded scripts explorer	64-bit Windows Support Large file support
June 2017	Terminal find, select & copy Command Palette MRU list Improved auto indentation Debugging Recipes	Multi-root workspaces: in preview Improved screen reader support
May 2017	Mini-map on by default (and others) Improved IntelliSense Documentation Resolve git conflicts inline	Faster debugging performance
April 2017	Workbench theming Source Control providers JavaScript Type checking	Improved download speed macOS Native Tabs
March 2017	Panel maximize & restore Async Call Stack support Keyboard shortcuts editor	Faster search over files Source Control API Increased extension size limit
February 2017	Minimap Drag & drop in editor Column breakpoints	Official Linux repositories Language specific settings
January 2017	Welcome experience Interactive playground Synchronized Markdown preview Inline variable display in debugging	Single file debugging Extension Packs
December 2016	OK - You got us, we took a break over the holiday period 😊
November 2016	Hot Exit Zen Mode JavaScript IntelliSense in HTML	New settings editor
October 2016	Horizontal Editor layouts Printable keyboard shortcuts sheets Conditional breakpoints Keymaps for Sublime & Atom

Phew - that was a long list of updates.

Looking forward

We are only getting started, and with almost 3,000 open feature requests we are not running out of ideas soon. So earlier this month we updated our public roadmap, which gives you an idea of where we are focusing next. As always push us along by up-voting requests you care about.

If you want to know what we have been up to check out our release notes if you are ever interested in what we shipped in a given month that's the first place to look. Of course you can track along with us by looking at our monthly iteration plans and by using our insiders build where you can get new stuff every day.

Ok that's it - but don't worry we will be back with more news and updates soon.

Happy Coding!

Sean