Visual Studio Code 1.7.2 | Hacker News Reader

Visual Studio Code 1.7.2

code.visualstudio.com

132 pointsggregoire48 comments

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The speed at which they release updates is at least impressive.

Visual Studio Code and Typescript have completely changed the way I look at MS.

Kudos to the team.

> The speed at which they release updates is at least impressive.

How so? Many companies and projects iterate this fast, many even faster.

> Many companies

True, but that wasn't the case with your grandpa's MS.

Shhh. Remember you're not supposed to criticize Microsoft here: they're the good guys now!

I have been using Windows Insider builds since 2014. It is unique experience for me to see an operating system get developed week by week. Though it is a pain to upgrade (not update) OS every week but it is totally worth my excitement. If I have any resentment I go to feedback app to share my thoughts, and surprisingly I get response too once in while from MS team. MS is not same MS. VS Code is just fraction of what MS has become.

> Visual Studio Code and Typescript have completely changed the way I look at MS.

Kudos to the PR team.

FTFY ;-)

Awesome!

In the next release we'll hopefully have the "hot-exit" behavior like Sublime, where you can close the editor without having to save files, and they're back where you left off when re-opening.

Apparently, the PR for this got merged only 2 weeks ago [1]

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/101#issuecomment-...

Given the recent increase in Windows' no-you-can't-stop-me update restart behavior this seems more important every week, at least on my Windows 10 guinea pig system. Being able to just throw some text into a blank buffer and not lose it in Notepad++ has made that my scratch pad of choice these days.

How can anyone work on an operating system that behaves that's way?

Complain about MacOS we might but at least it doesn't restart without us being able to stop it.

It actually isn't this way. In the control panel you simply tell the updates to install when you're not using the computer. The only time it forces you to update is when you have ignored or disabled the updates for a period of time.

Yes and no. It'll wait until you're not using the computer to install overnight, when you've been away for a while, whatever.

What it won't do as far as I've seen is allow applications to block the restart if perhaps they contain unsaved data. Your unsaved data is not Windows' problem, and after the restart it won't be yours either - if the app doesn't support hot exit/autosaving of modified buffers/documents then recreating unsaved data will be your problem (but still not Windows' problem).

That's the one feature that has me open up Sublime instead if VSCode (for now). I need a scratchpad I can get back to after I reboot.

Hoping they really have it out in the next release.

I hate this features. Why don't you just save your files?

I think these "recovery builds" are inevitable with the cadence they are maintaining on major releases.

Fastest moving MS project I've seen.

I'm really curious how big their team is that works on this. 2-pizza sized?

It really does blow my mind and it isn't at all like their monthly releases are in any way small. Take November's one that they are currently working on for instance here https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/milestone/30 there is just a bit under 500 different issues that this new release will touch on.

Looks to be ~20 people as far as I can tell (source: I'm a MS employee, not on the vscode team)

It's less than that. I used to be the designer on the team. For the initial release, we had 13 people.

With or without management overhead?

Touche. ;)

I'd be willing to send the team a couple pizza's for their work on this... It's my favorite product to ever come out of MS.

I believe they're in Switzerland, so you may want to be careful with that – or VSCode may become the most expensive software you're using this year :)

IIRC, there was/is a frequent stream of pizzas being delivered over the German-Swiss border because of the price difference – it got so much that they actually started to set up customs checks.

Okay, I'd be willing to order two U.S. typically priced large pizzas for the vs code team, assuming a reasonable option is available...

Void where prohibited, quantities limited, some restrictions may apply, batteries not included.

I wish they would consider changing the name of it, it's all but impossible to search for any internet wide resources on it.

I find VSCode usually does the trick.

I wish they would start working on a auto-update feature for linux installations

I've never seen that on Linux I think there are some technical limitation for that feature, Chrome doesn't have auto-update either.

Well, I'd be fine with apt-get upgrade... It's what Chrome does, as well.

I second this, I'd just appreciate better integration with apt - I'm already using this method to update my linux machines anyways

The problem with this is that if they support apt, where should it stop ? should they support portage, pacman, homebrew, Nix, Guix, yum, dpkg ?

I don't think it is Microsoft's job to provide packages for every manager. They should make an executable and then anyone who uses a package manager can package the program.

Here's where you can get a community PPA for VSCode: https://github.com/tagplus5/vscode-ppa

APT and YUM are the standard tbh, the rest is up to the community.

They are no standards.

And both DEBs and RPMs are often distro specific.

Linux releases should be done source only making it as easy as possible for packagers to compile using libraries present on the system; or using a tool like AppImage and packaging everything yourself.

The relevant issues:

apt: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/2973 yum/dnf: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/229

I have this and Sublime installed...until the editor gets rid of fuzzy fonts when scaling resolutions, I unfortunately have to stick to Sublime even though I reaaaaaaaaaaaaally like VS Code.

What do you mean with "scaling resolutions"?

I have a 4k screen, but like to set resolution scaling to 150% on Windows. MacOS also does this for the retina displays. It looks fine for the most parts, and fonts render fantastically with Sublime but VSCode fonts in the editor are blurry and make it harder on the eyes for reading.

Why does this point release require ffmpeg?

Electron (ie Chromium) dependency?

How does it require ffmpeg?

https://www.chromium.org/audio-video

The HTML Audio and Video support is probably all not used in Code. However I guess it could be hard to compile chromium (and electron) without these, if they didn't invest the additional effort to put them behind a compile flag.

It is, you can watch videos at the extensions marketplace.

Those are animated GIF's, not "real" videos.

Oops, my bad

Actually, audio/video can be and is used. There is an API for previewing HTML documents, <video> and <audio> tags work perfectly fine.

Will it bring npmjs down again? Is there any hidden new upgrade to npmjs recently?

Considering they've been working together with NPM since the previous recovery build, I highly doubt they would have released this unless both parties were really sure this will cause no problems.

Yes, I believe it uses https://www.npmjs.com/package/types-registry now, going by https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/a8ef77c3/src/se...

Two main issues combined to cause the NPM problems: NPM didn't cache 404 responses, so they were much more expensive than normal fetches, and VS Code issued way too many requests which resulted in 404s.

Both have been addressed -- NPM handles 404s better now, and VS Code will no longer request packages which don't exist (by downloading the registry package once). Either fix would have be sufficient, but having both is better.

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