The Visual Studio Code team has pushed out its monthly IDE update. Amongst other things, version 1.59 sees the tool’s testing API maturing, and gains native Jupyter notebook support as well as a preview for a debug Disassembly view.
The latter is meant to provide developers with more insight into active stack frames, and provide functionality to step through assembly instructions and set breakpoints on instructions to find bugs and bottlenecks. Since the preview was added by Microsoft’s C++ team, it only takes input from the MS C++ and Mock Debug extensions for now, though this might change if there’s enough interest.
The editor part of VS Code comes with new commands to set the cursor location to the next, previous, or parent fold, and a setting to automatically fold import statements. The terminal component saw a few adjustments as well and now allows the dragging and dropping of terminals across windows, includes ways to set terminal profiles contributed by extensions as the default, and can be configured to warn “when trying to close a terminal that has child processes under the shell process”.
Other than that, the VS Code team was able to finalise the first couple of testing APIs, which — as the name suggests — let users run tests directly out of the IDE. Of course, earlier versions could always be modified to do something similar through extensions. Microsoft, however, promises extension builders more flexibility and better performance with the native support that can be taken for a spin now.
Adventurous types can also try their hand at the new read-only isDefault property of the TaskGroup or the forceRecreate property that currently can be found in the AuthenticationGetSessionOptions API, as the VS Code team included those to gather initial feedback.
Speaking of extensions, devs can check an extension’s runtime status via a new runtime status tab in the associated pane and read up on details such as which category an extension belongs to or when it was last updated. The Live Preview extension introduced last month has been improved to work with VS Code’s JavaScript debugger, watch for automatically generated files in the filesystem, and provide more options in its embedded browser module.
The extension for working on GitHub pull requests and issues, meanwhile, allows devs to start working on an issue outside the currently open repo and should run into less issues with comments. Remote – Containers gained a devcontainer command line interface for opening a folder in a container or building dev container images.
Additional information on other changes, such as the reworked run and debug dropdown button, can be found via the VS Code web site.