v1.9.0

A crash that took Visual Studio down with it: expanding an auto-hidden chat pane could kill
devenv.exe outright, and the fix is two lines guarding against a WebView2 SDK bug that is still
open upstream. The transcript reads better too — an MCP call now says it is one instead of naming
the server where every other row names the action, its arguments and result are formatted JSON on
both sides, and the twenty CLI tools that used to fall through to a raw name over an input dump each
have a renderer. Three things that broke only when a message was sent with a file open in the editor
— a dead attachment click, ↑/↓ recalling nothing, history paging from the wrong place — turn out to
be the same off-by-one and are fixed together.

Added

• An MCP call says it is one, and both its cells are readable JSON. The row for
  mcp__server__tool read Vs [build_solution] — the server, where every other row names the
  action (Read, Grep, Web Search), so nothing on screen said the call went to an MCP server at
  all. It reads MCP Tool · vs · build_solution now, which also fills a detail that used to come
  up empty: the fallback looks for query/url/path, and MCP tools rarely carry those. Both
  cells are JSON by protocol — arguments in, serialised result out — so both are highlighted and the
  result is indented instead of arriving as one line that scrolls sideways. Clicking a cell used to
  open a .txt holding that same single line; it is now an indented .json on both sides.
• A renderer for every CLI tool (23 → 43). Twenty were falling through to the default renderer,
  which prints the raw tool name over its input JSON: the task tools (TaskCreate, TaskUpdate,
  TaskGet, TaskList, TaskStop, TaskOutput), the teams and their messages (TeamCreate, TeamDelete,
  SendMessage, Brief), the scheduled jobs (CronCreate, CronDelete, CronList), plus Sleep,
  RemoteTrigger, Config, LSP and REPL. The task rows are the ones that fill a transcript whenever
  sub-agents run, which is what started this. Three carry more than a header: SendMessage and Brief
  put the message itself in the body, REPL highlights its code and never clips it, LSP links to the
  file and line it asked about. Nothing lands on the default renderer now, which leaves it for what
  it is for — a tool this build has never heard of.

Fixed

• Expanding an auto-hidden chat pane could crash Visual Studio (issue #208). Not the pane: the
  whole IDE, with an unhandled ArgumentException on the UI thread.
  WebView2CompositionControl passes its size straight from a private SizeChanged handler to
  Direct3D11CaptureFramePool.Recreate, which throws on 0×0 — and VS docking hands the pane exactly
  that when an auto-hidden window is expanded, the content being re-added to the visual tree before
  the flyout is sized. The throw happens inside WPF layout, so nothing in the extension is in a
  position to catch it. The control now has a 1 DIP minimum, which stays ≥ 1px at every scale and is
  invisible in practice. The SDK bug is
  WebView2Feedback#5485, open since
  January 2026; the guard is worth keeping regardless, since Visual Studio loads its own
  WebView2.Wpf copy rather than the one the VSIX ships.
• Three things that only broke with a file open in the editor (PR #203). The host puts the
  editor-context tag in a content block of its own, ahead of everything else, and three places
  downstream assumed the user's content came first — which is why they looked intermittent.
  Clicking an attachment did nothing: the fetch asked for the block holding the tag and got
  image block not found. ↑/↓ recalled nothing: stripping the tag from the first text block
  left an empty string, so the prompt never entered the history — on one measured session, 72% of
  user messages carry that tag. History paged from the wrong place: a real turn read as a meta
  injection, and the pagination anchors on that.
• Sessions started from a Claude Code terminal saved nothing. Launch Visual Studio from inside a
  Claude Code session and every claude.exe the extension spawns inherited that session's identity.
  One of the inherited markers turns transcript saving off: no .jsonl, so no history, no
  --resume, and nothing in the statistics. The CLI does say so, but only in its own TUI, which the
  chat pane never shows — so the failure was silent. Three more variables are now stripped at
  launch, matching what the VS Code extension removes.

Internal

• CI runs the unit tests. The suite existed and nothing ran it, so a red suite could reach
  master unnoticed — 195 tests, under a second, in both workflows. It runs after the build and
  with -c Release --no-build, which is not a preference: the test project references the built DLL
  rather than the project, so running it first tests whatever bin/ happened to hold.
• Eight WebView dependencies moved to their current patch or minor. dompurify is the one that
  earned it — it sanitises the markdown the chat renders. TypeScript 7, @types/node 26 and
  Fluent 3.1.3 are deliberately held back.
• Seven exports nothing outside their own file reads are closed, two of them dead code. An open
  export is a contract to the rest of the WebView, and it invites callers past the function that
  knows the edge cases.
• A pass over the comments across CSS, TypeScript and C#, dropping the ones that no longer describe
  the code — among them three lines above a rule that does not exist, a claim of "no shadow DOM in
  our components" against 33 shadow to 8 light, and a "broadcast to ALL live chats" that the only
  emitter contradicts.

Install from the Visual Studio Marketplace, or from Extensions → Manage Extensions in the IDE.

Marketplace | Website

What's Changed

• feat(webview): render MCP calls as JSON, and give every CLI tool a renderer by @franklupo in #201
• ci: run the unit tests by @franklupo in #202
• fix(chat): count the IDE-context block by @franklupo in #203
• chore(deps): patch and minor bumps on eight WebView packages by @franklupo in #204
• fix(cli): strip three more inherited session variables by @franklupo in #205
• chore(webview): close seven exports nothing outside their file reads by @franklupo in #206
• chore: drop comments that no longer describe the code by @franklupo in #207
• fix(chat): a 0x0 layout pass on the chat pane took the whole IDE down by @franklupo in #209
• release: 1.9.0 by @franklupo in #210

Full Changelog: v1.8.0...v1.9.0