Fundamental experience is the foundation of everything. In this area, we will bring updates such as:<\/p>\n Java 21 support<\/b>: Full support around Java 21 and upcoming JDK releases.<\/span><\/p>\n Enhanced Code Navigation<\/b>: Seamlessly navigate through your Java codebase with improved efficiency and precision.<\/span><\/p>\n Advanced Debugging Capabilities<\/b>: We’re introducing new debugging features to empower you in identifying and resolving issues more effectively.<\/span><\/p>\n Reliability is one of the most mentioned issues from our users in the past year. We want to improve the stability of our platform so you can focus on your code without worrying about language server glitches or crashes, or code completion stops. We aim to build a stable and consistent coding experience for the users.<\/p>\n Compatibility is another major area of our focus. In this aspect, we are primarily targeting to improve Gradle development experience (such as project import success rate) on Visual Studio Code. In collaboration with Gradle, we just announced our open-source project of Build Server<\/a> for Gradle in early November. We will continue to build on top of this project to ensure build results in Visual Studio Code are consistent with the output obtained by running Gradle commands, which ultimately will improve combability.<\/p>\n Performance is always crucial to any development tool. From past user feedback we have consistently heard about performance issues under certain circumstances, therefore in the next several months, we are going to look into two areas:<\/p>\n Code completion quality impacts daily developer productivity. We’ve heard that our users want smarter coding assist with import statements. We’ve just added some nice support for this (shared in the next section) and there will be a few other code completion intelligence enhancements for the few next months as well.<\/p>\n Next area is project management. In this area, there are two parts. First part is to improve JDK configuration experience, this is something we wanted to do for both beginner and professional Java developers. The second part is to enhance the project creation and import experience. This includes:<\/p>\n We hope these project management improvements can let users become more effective at using Java projects during the entire lifecycle.<\/p>\n In terms of user experience, we have realized that some of our features and settings are not easy to discover to our users. Therefore we plan to make several updates to make them easier to use and discoverable. This includes:<\/p>\n We hope these UX changes will make some of the most common operations much easier for users to find.<\/p>\n AI has been quickly changing all aspects of how we build software, including the way we write code. Initially introduced in July, GitHub Copilot Chat is an AI companion in every step of your development cycle. In terms of user experience, it is a chat interface that allows developers to ask and receive answers to coding-related questions directly within a supported IDE. Recently announced in GitHub Universe<\/a>, GitHub Copilot Chat is becoming generally available in December.<\/p>\n In addition, shared from the speakers in this session<\/a>, soon the developers will be able to integrate with GitHub Copilot and GitHub Copilot Chat to extend their capabilities. Visual Studio Code Java is no exception, in the next few months we will explore how to leverage GitHub Copilot Chat to enhance your Java development experience, whether it\u2019s finding an error, writing unit tests, helping debug code, adding dependencies, or managing Java projects.<\/p>\n In addition to the updates we have provided above, Microsoft and Red Hat will continue to collaborate and deliver other upgrades, this includes more intelligent code completion enhancements and so on. We sincerely hope Java developers can get awesome experience on Visual Studio Code and please continue to provide us feedback whenever you can.<\/p>\n In addition to the roadmap, we also wanted to share some exciting recent feature updates.<\/p>\n As we shared in the roadmap above, we are making some improvements to the import experience. Our code completion suggestions for static import statements is based on a “whitelist” mechanism, therefore users need to use a specific setting to input their favorite static members so these types will get high priority prompts when typing code. Previously, this setting is hard to discover. Recently, we have added this setting into the “Quick Fix” light bulb suggestion, making this much easier to find. Here’s a demo:<\/p>\n Based on the setting above, we also realize that sometimes modifying the settings is not ideal enough. Therefore, we have also added some smart detection based on the current imported static members. If Visual Studio Code Java sees that there are some already some static import statements, when you type related code in your file, it will automatically suggest relevant code, without the need to modifying the setting, here’s the demo for this feature.<\/p>\n To use all features mentioned above, please download and install Extension Pack for Java<\/a> on Visual Studio Code.<\/p>\n If you are a Spring developer working on a Spring Boot application, you can also download the Spring Boot Extension Pack<\/a> for specialized Spring experience.<\/p>\n![\"VS](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/java\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/51\/2023\/12\/2.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nFundamental Experience<\/h4>\n
Reliability:<\/h4>\n
Compatibility:<\/h4>\n
Performance:<\/h4>\n
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Code Completion:<\/h4>\n
Project Management:<\/h4>\n
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User Experience:<\/h4>\n
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AI:<\/h4>\n
Looking Forward<\/h4>\n
Feature Updates<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Easier Discovery to Static Import Type Settings<\/h4>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nSmarter Code Completion for Static Import Types<\/h4>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nInstall Extension Pack for Java<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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