Coding in Java is supported in Visual Studio Code through an Extension Pack, which is a collection of extensions recommended by Microsoft, featuring a debugger, a test runner, IntelliCode, and more. The company continually updates its integrated development environment (IDE) to enhance support for the programming language. Now, it has revealed its development roadmap for the rest of the year.
Microsoft's roadmap covers July 2021 to December 2021. Throughout this time frame, the company will be focusing on a number of activities to improve Visual Studio Code for Java. First up is improvements to the inner-loop development process, which essentially means that the firm will be enhancing the experience for a developer who has begun to write their code in complex workspaces up until the point they deploy it in production environments. The improvements in this area also involve increased performance and reliability.
The Redmond tech giant plans to add support for build tools like Gradle, and will also deepen its existing Maven feature-set. Moving forward, it will support more Java versions and Spring framework in containers too. Support for Java 16 in remote dev containers was just announced in June. The company is hard at work enabling support for Java extensions in GitHub Codespaces as well.
Over on the software testing and debugging side of the fence, new Testing APIs will be supported, allowing for more testing coverage and metrics. Another feature currently in an exploratory phase is enabling virtual threads via Project Loom.
Finally, in terms of security, support for trusted and untrusted workspaces is under consideration. This feature will allow developers to open Java projects in a sort of a "safe mode" where certain capabilities will be disabled.
Microsoft has encouraged users to provide their feedback and log issues with Visual Studio Code for Java development on GitHub here.
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