News

TypeScript 4.7 GA, Visual Studio on Arm64, Azure Deployment Environments, More

• By David Ramel
• 05/27/2022

It was a big week for Microsoft-centric development news, including TypeScript 4.7 reaching General Availability, Visual Studio for Arm64 coming soon, Azure Deployment environments and more. Here's a look at what's new.

TypeScript 4.7
New features (with links for more info) as listed by Microsoft include:

• ECMAScript Module Support in Node.js:
• Control over Module Detection
• Control-Flow Analysis for Bracketed Element Access
• Improved Function Inference in Objects and Methods
• Instantiation Expressions
• extends Constraints on infer Type Variables
• Optional Variance Annotations for Type Parameters
• Resolution Customization with moduleSuffixes
• resolution-mode
• Go to Source Definition
• Groups-Aware Organize Imports
• Object Method Snippet Completions
• Breaking Changes

Visual Studio on Arm64
The next Visual Studio preview will run natively on Arm64 Windows 11, Microsoft announced at this week's Build developer conference. Developers using the preview will be able to build and debug Arm64 apps directly on Arm-based devices.

"We have been steadily building momentum to support our Arm64 developer community, which includes hardware, toolchain, and of course, Visual Studio," Microsoft said. "The Arm64 Visual Studio preview will be publicly available for everyone in the next few weeks."

Azure Deployment Environments
This is a new cloud service that helps developers quickly spin up app infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code templates in order to minimize set-up time while maximizing security, compliance and cost efficiency.

"You can pick from a catalog of curated templates and deploy them directly from where they live -- local CLI or custom developer portal," Microsoft said. "These templates allow developers to focus on coding and testing their application instead of dealing with the intricacies of provisioning the environment. Additionally, Deployment Environments enables dev infra teams to maintain consistency across teams, centralized common configurations and increase security."

Developers can apply to partake in a private preview, with a public preview expected in the next few months.

And More!
Here are links for yet more recent announcements:

• Java on Visual Studio Code update: New features include:
  • Signature Help improvements -- Tweaks for Signature Help, which shows the signature of a method in a tooltip when a developer types the parameter list start character (typically an opening parenthesis), include the ability for Signature Help to be triggered automatically, along with two new settings that control whether the Signature Help needs to triggered automatically, and whether the detailed method description needs to show automatically, such that both the signature and detailed documentation of the method will be displayed.
  • Control insert/replace mode for code completion -- This ensures that Java code completion suggestions that are accepted can be overwritten or inserted. That didn't always work every time before because the functionality was dependent upon Language Server Protocol (LSP) support. Now it fully works on all of the team's Java extensions. "In addition, you can use Shift key to switch between two modes on the fly!"
  • Grade improvements -- These include: the ability to pin favorite tasks; a bug fix for the reported issue in which searches for a task in a multi-level project duplicated the task indefinitely; and a bug fix for garbled Chinese characters.
• Windows Terminal Preview 1.14 release: While this primarily features bug fixes and tweaks to improve quality, it does include an experimental feature provided by a contributor that lets users split panes over one background image instead of individual background images for each pane. It also migrates the Windows Terminal to v1.13, which was announced in February and includes features such as:
  • Updated settings UI design
  • Auto-elevate profiles
  • New rendering engine
  • Customizable bell sound
  • New actions
• PyTorch-DirectML: Preview Release 3: This is a hardware-accelerated backend for training PyTorch models on any DirectX12 GPU on Windows and the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). See more here.