May Update丨Java on Visual Studio Code

Signing to help improve

Signature Help displays the method's signature in a tooltip when the user types the parameter list start character (usually an opening parenthesis). In our latest release, we've made some major improvements to this feature:

Signature help can now be triggered automatically
We've also added two settings to control 1) whether signature help needs to be triggered automatically 2) whether detailed method descriptions need to be shown automatically (meaning both the method's signature and the method description in the detailed documentation will be shown)
Here is a demo of this feature

Here's a screenshot of the behavior you can set to help with signatures:

If you're interested, you can check out the original PR for a full list of how to make better use of signature help

Insert/replace mode to control code completion

In Visual Studio Code, when you accept a code completion suggestion, you can choose to overwrite or insert, and you can change this behavior in the "Editor > Suggest: Insert Mode" setting. But in the past, this feature might not have worked for Java plugins as it required some adaptation in our plugins. However, in our latest release, this functionality is now fully available for our Java plugin. Also, you can use the Shift key to temporarily switch between the two modes! Here's a quick demo:

Here is a screenshot of setting this mode:

We hope these UX improvements will really help you code more efficiently!

Gradle update

As we shared earlier in the roadmap , building tooling is one of our main focuses. We're excited to share that in this area, Microsoft is working closely with Gradle Enterprise to improve our Gradle for Java plugin.

There are several new features to watch out for in the May release:

▌Fix commonly used tasks

It is very common to run some tasks commonly used by projects. To save developers time, we now have a feature that allows you to "pin" a Taskl to the top of the project view, making it easy to find the Task and run it again, you can even pass arguments to it. Here is a demo of this feature.

▌ Bug fix – support multi-level items and Chinese encoding issues

We received feedback from the community on an issue where when our plugin was searching for a task in a multi-level project, it would duplicate the task repeatedly. This is due to an incorrect call to the Gradle API. We have fixed this issue in the latest version.
Another issue that caused garbled Chinese characters has also been fixed. Both issues were reported from GitHub, and we thank the community for finding them and providing them with example projects and steps to reproduce. Please continue to share your feedback with us.

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