Dash 2.0: VS Code Extension

[nevadascout]

I'm going to write version 2.0 of Dash as an extension for VS Code.

It seems silly to re-invent the wheel and continue working on a standalone IDE when VS Code already has many useful features -- and the benefit of being cross-platform.

It does have some limitations, but I believe this is the best move for the future of Dash.

See the Q&A below for more info...

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Why VS Code instead of Sublime Text, or another editor?

First and foremost, I have experience writing extensions for VS Code.
Second, it has a very well documented extension API that makes it fairly easy to do things - both for me, and for anyone else who wants to contribute.
Third, extensions are written in either Typescript, Javascript or a mix of both which are much more accessible to potential contributors than C# is.

Why has development been quiet for so long?

I've been busy at work and with other life commitments which have had to take priority.

When is this going to happen?

Soon(TM). I'll be making a start on it within a few weeks, and hopefully have something releasable a month or so after that.

What will happen to the outstanding bugs and/or feature requests?

I will be migrating all of the existing bugs and features from the Issues section to a new repository that I'll create for the extension.

Any outstanding bugs will be fixed as part of the new code, and the new extension will support the majority of the current features and as many of the feature suggestions as are technically possible.

Some limitations of VS Code mean that certain features aren't possible at this stage. VS Code is still in heavy development, so it may be possible to do these in the future.

Can I do anything to help?

Right now, no - other than telling me if you have any feature requests for Dash!

Once the base code is written, you'll be able to contribute code written in Typescript or JS to the project in the form of pull requests.

What will happen to Dash 1.0?

Anyone who currently has Dash installed will continue to be able to use it just fine.

This repository will stay as it is -- as an archive. I'll be accepting pull requests for new features or bug fixes, but I won't be making any new releases of Dash 1.0.

Okay, this sounds cool. What new stuff will this bring?

The main two confirmed features that the extension will have I'm really excited about are:

1. Much better intellisense to support proper, scope-aware code completion, global renaming, "find all references", etc.
2. An SQF parser to immediately show syntax errors in the editor. This should hugely speed up development as these mistakes can be discovered at "compile" time instead of at runtime.

I've been dreaming about debugging SQF, so that's something I want to try to tackle later down the line with the extension.

Other than that, VS Code supports automatic code formatting, built-in git support, and a ton of other features too many to go into here.

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Thanks for reading this far!

I'm considering setting up a forum for the project to make it easier to communicate with users, and to have a central place for updates and things that aren't directly related to development of Dash. A(nother) place to share SQF tutorials, code snippets, etc.

Let me know what you think below.

[klemmchr]

Nice move. I already thought about creating a plugin for VS but I'm quite not that experienced like you. Hopefully you will maintain this longer than you did on Stash 😄

As I'm still quite interested into this I will of course still contribute to your future projects regarding Arma and SQF even if I don't use it anymore. Looking forward this is going to be awesome!

[Digi59404]

Any news on this?