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What's New in Visual Studio Code 1.22 (March Release)
Among the usual bevy of new features introduced on a monthly basis by the Visual Studio Code team is a new take on debugging breakpoints, called Logpoints. It comes in the March release, v1.22.
As the feature's name suggests, Logpoints uses logging to provide info about what's going on at a certain point in the code during the debugging of a project.
However, rather than stopping everything and "breaking" into the code to provide info as breakpoints do, Logpoints log the data to the console, especially useful when in investigating production code that can't be interrupted.
Logpoints allows you to monitor your code without stopping the process, Cloud Developer Advocate Brian Clark said in a video published last week (April 5). Think of it as everything you love about breakpoints without having to halt the execution of your application."
The March release, the VS Code team said, includes its first work toward this feature. A blog post explains "Logpoints are especially useful for injecting logging while debugging production servers which cannot be stopped."
The team explained that diamond-shaped icons mark Logpoints, which are sent as messages in plain text but which also can include expressions that can be evaluated within curly braces.
Other new features highlighted by Clark include:
- Syntax aware code folding, which adds improved folding for CSS, HTML, JSON, and Markdown files. For those languages, Clark said, code folding "is no longer based on the indentation but on the syntactic structure."
- Conversion to ES6 refactoring, via new Code Actions to convert to ES6 classes and modules. "Are you interested in using more modern JavaScript syntax but not sure how to get started?" Clark asked. "Well, VS Code is adding support to help out through a new feature called suggested Code Actions. These are visible through hints which can be seen as an ellipsis below parts of code that can be refactored. Hover your mouse over the ellipsis to see the full hint suggestion."
- Auto attach to process, which automatically attaches the debugger to running Node.js processes. "As a Node developer you may prefer to start your application through the integrated terminal without a launch configuration," Clark said. "With the new auto attach feature, you can jump right into debugging your Node app after starting it."
For further details, here are Microsoft's descriptions and links to the other major updates:
To see what's coming up, consult the VS Code Roadmap 2018.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.