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.

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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.

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!

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