At the George James Software booth at Global Summit last year we took the wraps off the work we've been doing to make our popular editing and debugging tool Serenji available on the Visual Studio Code platform.
Rather than requiring you to pull code from your namespaces into local files, then push the changes back to the namespace to run it, you work directly in the namespace. In other words, the editing experience is like Studio rather than like Atelier.
As well as editing code you can also debug it directly from VSCode.
We're now looking for people to test a pre-release. If you already use VSCode (or are willing to start doing so) and you would like access to the pre-release Serenji extension, please email me privately at the address on my DC profile at johnm@georgejames.com. Tell me what InterSystems platform(s) and version(s) you're working with, and what platform(s) you run VSCode on. I'd also like to know approximately how many years you have worked with ObjectScript, and whether your ObjectScript codebase consists mainly of classes or MACs or INTs. Plus, please indicate if you're already familiar with VSCode or not.
Thanks,
John Murray
Senior Product Engineer
George James Software
Hi John,
Would this include a certain level of independence between editing and Caché, Ensemble, IRIS version?
Especially a kind of "forward" compatibility as long as you don't go for new features?
To use our extension you have to install some code on the target server. This code works on the latest platforms (e.g. the IRIS 2018.2 Field Test container) and on versions back to well before InterSystems' Minimum Supported Version. Indeed, one of my targets is still on 2008.1.
So a single VSCode instance can connect to many different server versions.
Does that answer your question Robert?
I was thinking about this issue from @Wolf Koelling
IRIS Quarterly Container only releases and Studio
"install some code on the target server" sounds to have the potential to work around his show stopper.
Thanks! That solves my questions.
I just see close to me a situation that the upgrade to a higher version ( 16.2 to 18.1)
may trigger quite an effort on updating all developer's Studio. With all that "can never happen"
Hi John,
Do you plan on integrating the vscode extension with git somehow?
Of course, when we are editing source code on the file system (like with Atelier), it's fairly straightforward to put the code in a git repo (however, sync against Caché can be a mess).
If you are editing code directly against a Caché DB, this would probably require manually exporting the changes to the filesystem, or perhaps making the vscode manage the git objects directly against the repo.
Thanks!
We're actively researching options in this area.
Hi John,
Will one of you be in Antwerp next month to present/demonstrate this ?
Yes Herman, we hope to be there. But if you'd like to get your hands on it before then please contact me as indicated above.
It's now confirmed that I shall be attending the InterSystems Benelux Symposium.
Hello John, I can't see your email in your DC profile... I don't know if it's my fault or it's not public visible
Hi David!
Emails of DC members are not exposed publicly.
BTW, do we need private messaging on DC?
Sorry about that David. I've edited the post to include my email address.