There’s also another Windows 10 Insider build out
Roundup Microsoft continued its grand tradition of delivering developer tools and snapping up tech firms last week.
While Visual Studio users got a tickle in the form of a second preview of the 2019 edition, Microsoft didn’t forget about its open-source sibling, Visual Studio Code, and unleashed a preview of the PowerShell extension .
The extension, which supports PowerShell 5.1 and the new and shiny PowerShell Core 6 in Windows, fires up a console to allow devs to partake in all manner of PS shenanigans. What is particularly interesting (at least for command line jockeys like this author, who need all the help they can get) is PSReadLine support.
Existing PowerShell users will be familiar with PSReadLine, which brought helpful functions such as syntax colouring and multi-line editing to the shell. Now Visual Studio Code users get to join in the fun, in Preview form at least.
TypeScript, the JavaScript variant with optional type checking, also saw a release last week as a release candidate of version 3.3 of the language was emitted by the team.
The release, which can be picked up using NuGet, doesn’t break anything, but does introduce some new functionality. At the very least, it makes some old functionality work in a more logical way through tweaks to Union Types. Where previously the function was a little restrictive, the update intersects the parameters of Type signatures to create a new one.
The gang has also fixed an issue (or introduced a new feature, depending on your perspective) in the build process. Composite projects, introduced back in v3, allowed builds to be optimised by not compiling the whole thing every time. The team also lobbed out watch mode, which would only go for changed files (or anything that would hit dependencies).
Sadly, combining the two didn’t really work as one might expect. As the team put it: “An update in one project under –build –watch mode would force a full build of that project, rather than determining which files within that project were affected.”
With v3.3 the team has dealt with this, and -–build mode’s -–watch flag now behaves more logically, taking into account file watching.
