Microsoft finally announced this mysterious VS Code product roadmap!

Hello everyone and welcome to the January release of Visual Studio Code Java Update! This is our first blog of the new year as we review the highlights of 2021 and share our product roadmap for 2022! On top of that we have some exciting product updates, so let's get started!

2021 Review

2021 has been a very rich and busy year for Java support on Visual Studio Code. We've made major improvements to various sections in the Java Plugin Pack In these updates, we would like to highlight a few highlights:

Java™ Language Support Version 1.0

In 2021, we released the Language Support for Java ™, marking an important milestone and result of a multi-year collaboration between Microsoft and Red Hat. This release includes many important features such as Java 17 support, easier type hierarchy lookup, source code lookup, Gradle Kotlin (.kts) support, and more. In addition, we start from the 0.78 version of the code completion performance was series of optimization . With these optimizations, we saw a 60% reduction in average code completion response time.

Gradle for Java plugin release

Gradle support has always been a hot topic in the community. In October 2021, we officially released the " Gradle for Java " plugin to meet the Gradle needs of developers. The plugin now has over 230,000 downloads and we hope to continue iterating on the plugin.

New hands-on experience

A better onboarding experience is always a top priority. In 2021, we've made several improvements in this area, including the new Product Welcome Wizard in Visual Studio Code for Java developers. We've also redesigned the welcome view and help center pages so new developers can find the guidance they need.

Various user experience improvements

Throughout 2021, many user experience improvements have also been made to optimize the overall job drop rate for developers. This includes:

• Testing Experience – Test Runner for Java (Test Plug-in) adopts new test UI from Visual Studio Code for a better experience in features, functionality and ease of use.
• Project Management - As of the November update, we no longer generate .project metadata files in the project root folder! This is one of the most asked questions in the community, and we finally have a long-awaited solution. Click here see how we fixed the issue.
• Code Manipulation – We have added some features and constructors, etc. We will continue to work on making code related operations more accessible.

Spring support in GitHub Codespaces

In addition to the core Java plugin updates, there are also exciting updates in the remote development area. In September 2021, we announced that through a partnership with VMWare, the Spring Framework is now fully supported GitHub Codespaces Developers can seamlessly develop Spring applications directly in the browser environment.

If you want to see all the improvements we've made in 2021, check out the previous article.

user growth

In addition to product updates, in 2021 we also witnessed an increase in annual users. We now have over 1.5 million users developing Java in VS Code. This is the result of continuous feedback from users, and thanks to the support from the vast number of developers in the community.

2022 Product Roadmap

Now let's look ahead to 2022! In the new year, we will focus on the following areas:

Basic development experience improved

The foundational development experience directly impacts the day-to-day work of our developers, and this area will continue to be our top priority. This includes working to improve the intelligence of our code completion suggestions, providing more relevant code snippet generation, and providing various shortcuts (such as "syso" and "sout") based on user preferences. Additionally, we will further enhance our debugging experience. We will make a series of improvements, such as: allowing debugging of decompiled classes, faster evaluation in the variable view, and support for lambda expression evaluation. We will also explore Project Loom project to improve the performance of debugging. Additionally, showing test coverage is another feature we'd like to support to further enhance our Java testing experience. Finally, we've been working on supporting the latest Java technologies, and Java 18 support is in our plans.

Performance and Reliability

Performance and reliability are another area of focus for us in 2022. In this regard, we want to improve the reliability of the Java Language Server and reduce the number of cases where the Java Language Server becomes unresponsive. We also know from user feedback that importing a project for the first time can take a lot of time if there are a lot of dependencies to download, so we plan to look into this as well. Last but not least, we will continue to optimize code completion performance.

build tools

Build and dependency management have always been a key part of Java development, especially for large and multi-module projects. We will continue to Gradle for Java extension and improve the existing Maven extension .

Better Spring Boot framework support

The Spring Boot framework is one of the most popular Java frameworks that allows developers to easily build microservices or web applications. The current Spring Boot extension pack contains many features to optimize the Spring development experience on Visual Studio Code, but we have heard feedback from the Spring developer community and plan to do more. We will be working with VMWare on improvements to the core Java plugin package and the Spring plugin package, the following are general directions for improvement:

• Easier creation of Spring components (e.g. Spring projects and Spring beans)
• Automatic code generation for commonly used Spring classes and components
• Better visualization of Spring components (e.g. Spring bean diagrams and lists of REST API mappings)
• Better Spring project lifecycle management in Spring Dashboard
• Optimize support for Spring related libraries when managing dependencies

With these Spring improvements, we really hope that the Spring development experience on Visual Studio Code will be easier than ever.

User Experience

The next area we focus on is user experience (UX). In 2021, we've had a lot of situations where users want a feature, but it's already there, just because it's hard to find and can't find it. So making features easier to use and easier to discover will be our focus in this area. We also recognize that Java developers may come from different Java IDE backgrounds, so it will be easier for us to migrate setups and configurations from other IDEs. Finally, we know that there are a lot of student developers using Java in Visual Studio Code, so we plan to make some improvements for educational scenarios, such as better JUnit testing end-to-end experience for projects without build tools, optimizing JavaFX/Swing's Project creation workflow, and a smoother Java AWT package import experience. Finally, we'll also look into supporting Live Share in our Java extension.

Cloud Native Development

Cloud native has been one of the hottest topics in the software development industry in recent years. When adopting a cloud-native development approach, developers need to deal with different technologies such as microservices, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, and more. To meet developer needs in this area, we plan to explore deeper integration with Kubernetes, as well as provide integration with different cloud services such as Azure Spring Cloud . Remote Development Plugin and GitHub Codespaces Visual Studio Code, our goal is to make cloud-native development a great experience for Java developers.

Feature update

In addition to the roadmap, we have some exciting new products to share:

Java plugin package comes with JRE

We have good news to tell you - With Visual Studio Code in respect support different platforms plug , we now have embedded into our Java JRE plug-in, which means that users no longer need to worry about the configuration JDK to run plug-ins, Just configure the JDK for the project. We've also updated the Getting Started and Configure Java Runtime pages (Ctrl+Shift+P: "Configure Java Runtime") to reflect this change. For new users, just install the Java plugin package , download the JDK required for the project (supports Java 1.5 or higher), create the Java files, and happily code!

Java Code Format File Configuration

We often hear from developers that they need to configure the format file for their Java code, but they can't find a good place to preview the effect. To address formatting issues, we previously introduced a view where developers can change formatting settings and preview the effect. You can access this feature in two ways:

First option - just bring up the command palette ( Ctrl+Shift+P ) and run the "Java: Open Formatter Settings with Preview" command

Image formatterpreview

Second option - Use "Java: Help Center" ( Ctrl+Shift+P , then run "Java: Help Center" command). This will open the Java Help Center page with a list of very useful functions and shortcuts. On this page, just click on "Configure Formatter Settings".

Help Center

Using either of the above options will lead you to the formatter settings view, where you can easily change and preview code formatting settings in Visual Studio Code.

Feedback and suggestions

In 2022 there will be many exciting updates to Java on Visual Studio Code, and as always, your feedback and suggestions are very important to us and will help shape our future products. There are several ways to leave us feedback

• Fill out the Chinese questionnaire
• comment under this post
• Create Issue on our GitHub repo
• Email [e-mail]

Resources

The following links and resources can help you better understand Java on Visual Studio Code

• Learn on Visual Studio Code
• And gradually explore there off Visual Studio Code of Java Tutorial

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