VS Code v1.72 now includes community discussions for extension authors

Published on Oct 08, 2022

Visual Studio Code’s secret sauce is the vast array of extensions available in its marketplace, which provide a wide range of functionality, almost making it a full-fledged integrated development environment.

Therefore, the company typically devotes development time to serving extension authors in its series of regular monthly updates to its open source code editor.

Microsoft announced a new GitHub site tailored exclusively for extension authors as part of the September 2022 update, version 1.72.

Microsoft announced the launch of VS Code Community Discussions, a place for extension authors to share ideas, ask questions, and connect with other developers. “You can find announcements related to the VS Code APIs there, ask questions or search for answers, and view the Extension Show and Tell.”

While the site currently limits discussions to extension development, more categories will be added as the community grows. In the FAQ that answers the question, “Why are there just categories for extension development?” the answer is: “We want to start small, and the extension author community is the right size. Meanwhile, StackOverflow continues to serve most other questions.”

As a result of the team’s desire to avoid mixing up the extension discussion site with the existing issue triage process for the time being, it was placed in a separate GitHub repository from the main VS Code repository. However, it is considering adding more categories for topics that have their own repos, such as Python, remote development, etc.

There are currently announcements on this site, including one regarding deprecated extensions, as well as many pages of discussions ranging from “Injection grammar extension (for syntax highlighting)” to “How do I reset my view?”

The September 2022 update also includes new Updates sections that display recently updated extensions and extensions that require attention, as well as a button that allows developers to disregard updates for extensions. The installed extensions can also be sorted in several ways.