VS Code Beta, OSS, Extensions and more

Last week was a very exciting week. The Connect(); //2015 event was held and about a million things were shown and announced. Some of the cooler announcements revolved around VS Code

v0.10.1 (November - Beta 2015)

With this release, we mark our official Beta milestone and the big news is that VS Code now supports extensions (plug-ins) and is open source!

VS Code Supports Extensions!

VS Code has great features out of the box but now you and the community can extend VS Code to add new features and languages.

Extension Gallery

Find and install cool extensions by searching VS Code's public extension gallery. There you'll find new themes, snippets, languages and tools.

Extensibility SDK

If you don't find an existing extension that meets your development needs, you can create your own. We've added extensive documentation on how to extend VS Code and a full extensibility API reference. In addition, we provide the tools to you need to create and publish extensions.

Yo Code Extension Scaffolding

We've updated the yo code generator to create a basic extension project (TypeScript or JavaScript) which has all the metadata and source files necessary for a working extension.

Extension Publishing

The vsce publishing tool lets you easily package and publish your extension. You can share your extension with colleagues by distributing a VS Code extension package or publish your extension for the community on the public gallery.

Extension samples

If you'd rather start your extension by modifying a working example, you can find extension samples as well as the source code for many extensions on GitHub (Go Language Support).

VS Code is Open Source!

You spoke and we listened. With this release, VS Code development is now open source on GitHub.

Add TextMate Snippets

Another addition to the yo code generator is the option to add TextMate Snippets (.tmSnippets) to VS Code. Run yo code, select New Code Snippets and specify a folder containing TextMate snippet files. The generator will convert them to the VS Code snippet format and create a VS Code extension for your own use or to share on the gallery. The generator also supports Sublime snippets (.sublime-snippets).

Debugging - Debug Console Improvements

• Colored text output to highlight diagnostic errors and warnings
• Support file path links with line and column information for quick source code navigation.

   

Debugging - Easy Variable Selection

Directly add selections to the Debug Console and Watch window with two new editor commands:

• Debug: Evaluate - add the text selection to the Debug Console
• Debug: Add to Watch - add the text selection to the Debug Watch window

Debugging - Debug environment configuration

When you create your initial debug configuration (launch.json), VS Code now asks for your specific debug environment (Node.js, Mono) and creates a launch.json specific to that environment. VS Code also detects the type of request ('launch' or 'attach').

Debugging - Hover

Debug hover behavior has been improved: it is now possible to hover over object properties or variables that are not in the top stack frame.

Debugging - Node.js

Starting with this release, we are now launching the Node.js debug target in the internal VS Code Debug Console. This eliminates the tedious management of external console windows and brings program output and the Node.js REPL closer together. Since the Debug Console does not support programs that need to read input from the console, the external console is still available and you can enable it by setting the attribute externalConsole to true in your launch configuration.

Improved Syntax Highlighting

We updated all our syntax highlighters to emit tokens which are compatible with TextMate themes. Custom color themes now work with all languages, including HTML and CSS.

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Language - PHP

VS Code is now using the official PHP linter (php -l) for PHP language diagnostics. VS Code will now stay current with PHP linter improvements.

Languages - Workspace relative TypeScript version

If you want to use a newer version of TypeScript, you can define the typescript.tsdk setting pointing to a directory containing the TypeScript tsserver.js and the corresponding lib.*.d.ts files. This setting now supports relative paths so you can easily share this workspace setting with your team and use the latest TypeScript version (npm install typescript@next).

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The coolest announcement was that VS Code itself is now open source.

Visual Studio Code - Open Source

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

VS Code is a new type of tool that combines the simplicity of a code editor with what developers need for their core edit-build-debug cycle. Code provides comprehensive editing and debugging support, an extensibility model, and lightweight integration with existing tools.

The vscode repository is where we do development and there are many ways you can participate in the project, for example:

• Submit bugs and feature requests and help us verify as they are checked in
• Review source code changes
• Review the documentation and make pull requests for anything from typos to new content

Contributing

If you are interested in fixing issues and contributing directly to the code base, please see the document How to Contribute, which covers the following:

• How to build and run from source
• The development workflow, including debugging and running tests
• Coding Guidelines
• Submitting pull requests

Related Projects

Many of the core components and extensions to Code live in their own repositories on GitHub. For example, the node debug adapter and the mono debug adapter

For a complete list, please see the Related Projects page on our wiki.

License

MIT

The fun thing is to use VS Code to compile VS Code. Following the instructions on How to build and run from source I was able to prep, and compile VS Code

If you are looking for a code focused editor, that you can extend and is OSS, you have to check out VS Code.

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