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Insiders Program for Visual Studio Code Evolves

The retirement of the Insider Program means -- voila! -- the Insiders Build for Visual Studio Code developers.

Visual Studio Code by its very nature as as Web-centered technology is constantly being updated. There has been so much evolution, the team developing it has started to centralize everything in one place just so developers can keep up with developments. It made the blog move from the MSDN blog site to its very own corner at https://code.visualstudio.com/ official as of February 20.

Evolution is also been the case for it's Insiders Program. For those who joined it, developers were able to participate earlier in using some of the more experimental features before those features were released to the general developer community.

The Insider Program was a bit cumbersome, however. As Microsoft's Chris Dias explains in a blog post, "You had to choose whether you want to work with the Stable (the official monthly release) or the Insiders version. You could not easily switch back to Stable if you hit a blocking issue with the Insiders drop, without having to change settings." So, the team retired the Insider Program back in November. And with the January release of VS Code earlier this month, the team introduced a new Insider Build.

What's the difference, besides the change in nomenclature? "No longer do you need to manage settings to switch between the two," notes Dias. "The Insiders build is a separate installation with isolated settings, extensions, and configurations.  This does mean that you will need to configure both and install your favorite extensions into each, but once you've done this, trying out new features (and giving us feedback!) is easier than ever."

The other new part is that it's self-updating. Dias describes a plan that mainly will go forward on monthly updates, but he says that updates can be put out on the wire with more frequency.

To learn more, check out the blog post from Dias here.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

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