Microsoft released its roadmap for its planned updates for Java on Visual Studio Code and highlighted its most important improvements in 2021.
2021 saw substantial improvements on all extensions in the Extension Pack for Java including 1.0 release of Language Support for Java, a Gradle for Java extension release, a new and better getting started experience, and various user experience improvements.
Test Runner for Java adopted the new Testing UX from Visual Studio Code in order to offer a better testing experience in terms of feature, capability and ease of use and project management no longer generates .project metadata files in the project root folder.
Microsoft said in 2022 it plans to focus on improving the fundamental inner-loop experience that impacts developers’ daily productivity. This includes efforts to improve code completion suggestions, provide more relevant code snippet generation, and offer various shortcuts based on user’s preference. The debugging experience will also be improved.
The company will also focus on performance and reliability, with updates like improved reliability of Java Language Server. This will include reducing the number of instances where the Java Language Server becomes unresponsive.
The company will continue to add new features to the Gradle for Java extension and the existing Maven extension.
Also, it will make improvements to core Java extensions and Spring extensions such as making it easier to create workflows of Spring projects, controllers and beans; better visualization of core Spring concepts; and more.
Microsoft also shared new features that are now available, such as the now-embedded JRE in Java extensions and added the ability to configure Java formatter settings.
Additional details on the roadmap for 2022 are available here.
