PowerShell Extension for Visual Studio Code August 2022 Update

Sydney Smith

Andy Jordan

We are excited to announce that the August update to the PowerShell Extension for Visual Studio Code is now available on the extension marketplace.

This release adds a walkthrough experience for getting started with PowerShell in VS Code, more regression tests, a major LSP client library update, and includes a number of bug fixes!

Updates in the August Release

Note that these updates all shipped in our PowerShell Preview Extension for VS Code before shipping in our stable channel.

Some highlights of August releases:

For the full list of changes please refer to our changelog.

Getting Started Walkthrough

As a part of this release we have introduced a getting started experience for PowerShell in VS Code. This experience was designed through a series of customer surveys and interviews conducted by our summer intern. The walkthrough can be accessed on the Getting Started page in VS Code, or through the command pallette.

image

We look forward to getting more feedback on this walkthrough and learning how we can improve it.

LSP Client Library Update

This release also includes a major update to our LSP client library dependency, vscode-languageclient. The extension uses this library to start, connect, and communicate with the LSP server, PowerShell Editor Services.

By incorporating this update in vscode-powershell #4128 we were able to prevent a number of race conditions that could be encountered during startup, as the latest version of this library allows us to register our notification and request handlers before starting the server. The lifecycle management code was also given some much needed attention, and so startup and shut-down is now a more stable experience.

Please note that due to an upstream change, there is now a second notification when the server is stopped. We are working with the upstream team to de-duplicate this popup, and are also contemplating enabling a configurable auto-restart of the server.

Getting Support and Giving Feedback

While we hope the new implementation provides a much better user experience, there are bound to be issues. Please let us know if you run into anything.

If you encounter any issues with the PowerShell Extension in Visual Studio Code or have feature requests, the best place to get support is through our GitHub repository.

Sydney Smith and Andy Jordan PowerShell Team

1 comment

Discussion is closed. Login to edit/delete existing comments.

  • William 3

    I downloaded it. I like how the keybindings are similar to PowerShell ISE.
    I actually downloaded yesterday to troubleshoot the released version of the PowerShell VScode extension.
    The old extension would now start a powershell terminal session successfully.
    I downloaded the preview PowerShell extension and this resolved the issue.
    I was working with it for my code successfully in minutes because it uses similar keybindings to PowerShell ISE.
    It runs smooth and lets me step into the code.
    Starting up is the session works and where before it did not.
    I do not know what you did to fix it, but I like it.

Feedback usabilla icon