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-composeand 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...
| 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 Pallette 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