Visual Studio Code Preview 0.8.0 Improves on Debugging -- Visual Studio Magazine

Visual Studio Code Preview 0.8.0 Improves on Debugging

Preview version 0.8.0 adds TypeScript 1.6 support, improved debugging features, themes, and takes care of Windows setup bugaboos that have plagued some VSC users.

By Michael Domingo
09/18/2015

The Visual Studio Code Preview version 0.8.0 has a number of small but important changes that are meant to streamline code editing -- new themes, improved debugging, TypeScript 1.6 support -- but big on the list is one that takes care of some reported Windows setup bugaboos.

"We adopted a new installation and update framework for Windows based on Inno Setup. This fixes many Windows integration issues and streamlines the update story, " according to a post on the Visual Studio Code preview blog. Inno Setup is a popular Windows installer developed by Jordan Russell and Martin Laan as an open source project.

As explained in the blog, the setup for 0.8.0 version is a two-step process, which requires all command windows be closed in order for VSC to be able to pick up the righ PATH settings. As well, 0.8.0 uses .vscode as the top-level folder rather than .settings, to make it more obvious when working with a number of IDEs.

Two new changes have been incorporated on the debugging end. One is that VSC is no longer dependent on Mono when debugging on OSX or Linux. What's changed is that the team has "ported the implementation of the Node.js debugging support from C#/Mono to TypeScript/Node.js." The other change is the addition of a preview of the Debug Console that allows for expression evaluations on the fly.

The team said that "TypeScript 1.6 support should be considered experimental," so it's there but it's available for testing purposes only. Since VSC uses version 1.5 by default, it has to be manually enabled. Once enabled, VSC can support colorizing in TypeScript JSX .tsx files as well as JSX files.

Other noteworthy changes include support for ESlint and JSlint in JavaScript files; an Undo Last Commit with Git; and an echoCommand property available from within Tasks, as well as a handful of fixes.

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