Update the UI Toolkit to use v2+ of @microsoft/fast-element and v3+ of @microsoft/fast-foundation

[guiherzog]

Feature request

Hi, we had a discussion about some issues on @microsoft/fast and they have been addressed on @microsoft/fast-element v2+ and @microsoft/fast-foundation v3+.

They are still in beta, but I would love to know if are you planning on updating this lib's dependencies to use those versions? If yes, when are you planning on doing that? A rough idea / estimate would already help.

Use case

We want to use this library to build internal VS Code extensions at Google, however, since some security concerns were raised, we cannot use until it gets updated.

References

The issue we were discussing was this one: microsoft/fast#6456
Thank you!

[hawkticehurst]

Hey @guiherzog! Thanks for calling this out (and linking the associated FAST issue)!

I haven't been keeping a close eye on FAST updates recently but I am happy to do some investigating on our end and report back

[guiherzog]

That would be great, thanks!

[guiherzog]

Hi all,

I hope you are doing well, do you have any updates in whether this is going to be done or not?
No rush, of course.

Thanks :)

[hawkticehurst]

Hey @guiherzog!

Apologies for the slowness in response, I feel fairly confident that we will indeed adopt the new changes from FAST!

I'm just waiting to have a meeting early next week with the FAST folks to talk about more of the details and hopefully get a better sense of potential timelines –– so I should be able to give final response by next week :)

[hawkticehurst]

Hey @guiherzog, we will be moving forward with this work!

We'll be working with the FAST folks to make this happen/sort out any remaining details that come up, but at this point, we have the goal of completing this by end of June '23

--

P.S. as a heads up, I'll be out of the office starting at the end of this week until Feb 21 so I'll be unresponsive for a bit, but will pick this up once I'm back

[guiherzog]

Hi @hawkticehurst,
This is great news, thank you for the update!

June '23 seems a bit far away. Do you mind elaborating on the timeline, if possible?
How much work do you think that would be, a few weeks?

Thanks again!

[hawkticehurst]

Of course!

Also yes, totally reasonable question. I'd also wager the work should only take a handful of weeks in total, but June '23 is more a reflection of a reality where both the toolkit and FAST teams are really tightly resourced at this time.

On the toolkit side, myself and one other person currently split our time between this and a handful of other projects, so we wanted to make sure the timeline acknowledged that we won't always be able to work on the toolkit during the next few months.

We also wanted to leave some room for the FAST team to get their releases closer to stability (which are currently in alpha/beta states) too. And finally, we wanted to leave some buffer room for testing, updating docs, and generally leaving room for any potential snafus since these updates will cause a breaking change/new major release for the toolkit.

My hope is that we'll publish a beta or vnext release in the lead-up to June, so you may be able to start taking advantage of these changes sooner than later. And of course, if we find ourselves with more time than expected to work on this and development goes smoothly I'll happily release these changes early –– but June '23 is what we considered to be a safe/realistic timeline given all the various constraints.

Hope that all makes sense and let me know if you have any more questions :)

[guiherzog]

This is a very thoughtful answer.
I completely understand it, thanks a lot for taking the time to write it.

When you get to work on it, I am happy to send a few PRs with some of the work, if that helps.
Of course, I am not as familiar with the lib as you are, but I can still offload some work from you.

Cheers,
Gui

[hawkticehurst]

You're welcome!

Also thank you for the offer! If/when we create a vnext release for these changes, getting some early usage and feedback from you all would probably be the most helpful thing you could provide!

Beyond that, if I think of anything else I'll let you know :)

[guiherzog]

Sounds great,
Thanks, please let me know. :)

[hawkticehurst]

Hey @guiherzog, thought I'd give a quick status check-in.

I created a vnext branch a few weeks ago and finished up a lot of the foundational/infrastructural changes that were a prerequisite for updating to the new versions of FAST.

I'm now just waiting on some help from the FAST team to update everything since the new FAST APIs aren't formally documented yet. I know they're wicked busy prepping for these new releases so I'm not quite sure when the update will happen but still feeling mostly confident about the end-of-June timeline I proposed.

I'll keep you updated as work progresses or if anything changes :)

[guiherzog]

That's great to hear, looking forward to it and thanks for taking the time to write the update!