Improvements in the source code editor Visual Studio Code Microsoft announces roadmap for Java in VS Code
Broader build tool support, remote development, testing and debugging: With regard to Java development with Visual Studio Code, or VS Code for short, Microsoft has a lot planned for the second half of 2021.
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Microsoft’s roadmap for the further development of “Java on Visual Studio Code”.
(Picture: Microsoft)
In a blog post, Nick Zhu, Senior Program Manager in Microsoft’s Developer Division, highlighted current and future improvements to Java under Visual Studio Code. Since the June update, developers can actively determine whether they are working in a trusted environment and enable a restricted mode if necessary. In addition, Java 16 is now enabled in the Dev container for remote development.
According to Zhu, further improvements are planned for the months of July to December 2021. First of all, the user experience should be fundamentally improved. First of all, this concerns the areas of code completion and navigation, package import and compilation. They also want to rework the handling of projects with large scale and complicated structures, such as those found in companies, as well as performance and reliability.
When managing builds and dependencies, developers should benefit from broader and deeper tool support. The former is implemented by the support of Gradle, initially the task management and the creation of Gradle files are introduced. In depth, in turn, Microsoft wants to improve its use of Maven tools and add new features to support additional scenarios such as changing profiles.
The remote development function, recently upgraded to Java 16, in which a container serves as a full-fledged development environment, should support further Java versions and the Spring Framework in the future. In addition, Microsoft is working to provide Java language extensions in GitHub codespaces so that developers can use all Java-related tools in the cloud.
Thanks to new testing APIs, Java developers in Visual Studio Code will benefit from more extensive output and access to more test metrics such as test coverage. In debugging, Microsoft is exploring the possibility of increasing performance using virtual threads (see also Oracle’s “Project Loom”).
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