visual studio code javascript popularity

Introducing a new extension model has allowed the Visual Studio team to deliver several important improvements. It does this by allowing extensions to run outside the Visual Studio process, so if one crashes or pauses, it will not affect the host IDE.

It changes the way extension code interacts with Visual Studio and reduces the risk of an extension crashing or hanging your IDE. The biggest changes to Visual Studio extensions are coming with a completely new extension model, now renamed VisualStudio.Extensibility. There’s more to be done to port existing extensions to the new environment, but porting progress has been good, and it should be possible to reassemble your usual toolchain in 64-bit form, ready for Visual Studio 2022. In 2021 I looked at how Visual Studio 2022 added support for 64-bit extensions, but there’s a lot more going on than supporting a larger address space.

At the heart of this model is a toolkit that helps you get over the hurdles in extension development, with templates, API wrappers, and dedicated tools. It allows you to build your own tools that hook into the Visual Studio environment, using hooks in the UI and a built-in language server to add your own code highlighting and completion features. Key to that flexibility is Visual Studio’s extension model. There’s even support for the latest AI-powered coding assistants.

The result is a flexible development environment that supports modern development models, including remote development and shared code. You can preconfigure toolchains, as well as pick and mix the features that help you deliver code. Today Visual Studio is a single application that dynamically loads the tools and languages needed to build your project. More than 25 years of evolution have brought us a customizable development environment that goes a long way beyond the original common UI for a set of development tools. Notwithstanding the immense popularity of the Visual Studio Code programmer’s editor, the Visual Studio IDE is still at the heart of Microsoft’s development toolchain strategy.

Visual studio code javascript popularity