Microsoft announces VS Code Java 2022 roadmap!

Recently, Microsoft announced the development roadmap for Visual Studio Code Java in 2022.

In the first blog post of the new year, published on January 20, Microsoft reviewed the highlights of 2021 and officially released the 2022 roadmap, which includes some key areas and exciting feature updates.

Basic development experience improvement

Microsoft said that this area will continue to be Microsoft's primary focus as the basic inner-loop experience affects the daily productivity of developers. These include improving the intelligence of code completion suggestions, providing more relevant snippet generation, and providing various shortcuts (like "syso" and "sout") based on user preferences.

In addition, Microsoft will further improve the debugging experience. These include: allowing debugging of decompiled classes, faster evaluation in variable views, and lambda expression evaluation; exploring the possibility of enabling virtual threads powered by the new ProjectLoom for better debugging performance. Also, showing test coverage is another feature Microsoft wants to support to further enhance its Java testing experience. Lastly, there will always be an attempt to support the latest Java technologies, so Java 18 support is on the company's roadmap.

performance and reliability

Performance and reliability is another area Microsoft is focusing on in 2022. In this area, Microsoft wants to improve the reliability of the Java language server and reduce the number of cases where the Java language server becomes unresponsive. According to community information, if there are many dependencies that need to be downloaded, it may take a lot of time to import the project for the first time, and Microsoft will also carry out further research on this.

build tools

Build and dependency management have always been a critical part of Java development, especially for large and multi-module projects. In this regard, Microsoft will continue to add new features to the Gradle for Java extension and improve the existing Maven extension.

Spring Boot end-to-end support

As one of the most popular Java frameworks, the Spring Boot framework 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, and after learning of the requirements of the Spring developer community, Microsoft believes that more can be done - a follow-up cooperation with VMWare on core Java extensions and Spring Extensions make improvements, here is a general list of areas for improvement:

• Easier workflow for creating Spring projects, controllers and beans
• Better visualization of core Spring concepts (like beans and API mapping)
• Boilerplate code generation for Spring controllers and classes
• Improving Spring Application Lifecycle Management in the Spring Boot Dashboard
• A more intuitive experience for adding Spring libraries when managing dependencies

With these Spring improvements, hopefully the Spring development experience on Visual Studio Code will be easier than ever.

user experience

As the next area of Microsoft's investment, user experience (UX) will become a key focus, such as developers' need for easier-to-use features. After realizing that Java developers may come from different Java IDE backgrounds, Microsoft will make it easier to migrate settings and configurations from other IDEs.

Also, since many student developers use Java in Visual Studio Code, Microsoft plans to make some improvements to this, such as better JUnit testing end-to-end experience for projects without build tools, project optimization for JavaFX/Swing projects Creating workflows, a smoother import experience for Java AWT packages, and hopefully Live Share support in Java extensions.

cloud native development

Cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in the software development industry these days. With a cloud-native development approach, developers need to deal with microservices, cloud platforms, Kubernetes, and more. To meet the needs of developers in this area, Microsoft plans to explore deep integration with Kubernetes, as well as interaction with different cloud services such as Azure Spring Cloud. Make cloud-native development a great experience for Java developers with Visual Studio Code's remote development extension and GitHub code space.

Feature update

Embedded JRE in Java Extensions

With support for platform-specific extensions in Visual Studio Code, Microsoft has now also embedded the JRE into Java extensions. At the same time, Microsoft has also updated the getting started experience and configuring the Java runtime page (Ctrl+Shift+P: "Configure the Java runtime"). New users simply install the Java Extension Pack download project's Java Development Kit (supports Java 1.5 or higher), create a Java file, and then happily code.

Configure Java formatter settings

To address the programmer's problem with configuring formatter settings for Java code, Microsoft has introduced a view where developers can change formatter settings and preview the effect. This feature can be accessed in two ways:

Option 1: Just open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) and run the "Java: Open Formatter Settings with Preview" command

Option two: Use "Java:Help Center" (Ctrl+Shift+P, then run the "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 Configure Formatter Settings.

Help Center

Executing either of the above options will take the user to the Formatter Settings view, where the user can easily change and preview formatter settings in Visual Studio Code.

feedback and suggestions

In 2022, Visual Studio Code will also be continually updated for Java development and shape future products based on user feedback and suggestions.

Original link: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/java/java-on-visual-studio-code-update-january-2022/#fundamental-development-experience-improvement