Extension Authors Call for March 2020

[eamodio]

Refs: #91714

Here is the rough plan for our extension authors call for March. The call will be on April 7th. The theme of this first call is "ice-breaker" 😄

Agenda

• [~20 mins] Introductions — we are planning on having ~6 community members and we want to hear about yourselves and your extension(s)
• [~40 mins] Discussions of each member's answers to "If you had 2 wishes to change/fix/improve VS Code and the marketplace, what would they be and why?", and also 1-2 (smaller) quality-of-life improvement items

Participants

Since we want a small set of participants to facilitate richer and more effective communication, we are asking everyone who is interested in participating to fill out the sign up link below:

Sign up to participate Sign-ups are over for this month's call

Sign-ups will end on April 1st. After which, we will reach out and confirm the set of authors who will be participating in the call, and will update this post with the final list.

Logistics

On April 7th at 9am PT (12pm ET), via a MS Teams call. Unfortunately, for this first call, we won't have a live stream setup for the broader community to join in and comment, but we will post a link to the recorded video at the end of the call. We are definitely looking into getting a live stream setup for future calls.

[eamodio]

The call will be held on April 7th (tomorrow) at 9 am Pacific Time.

So far we will have the following participating extension authors:

• David Anthoff (Julia)
• Caleb Collins-Parks (AREPL for python, and more)
• Alessandro Fragnani (Project Manager, Bookmarks, and more)
• Tyler Leonhardt (PowerShell)
• Taras Novak (Data Preview and more)
• Peter Pezaris (CodeStream)
• Yuki Ueda (R and more)

[eamodio]

Thank you to everyone who participated in this first call!

Video

Participants

• David Anthoff (Julia)
• Caleb Collins-Parks (AREPL for python, and more)
• Alessandro Fragnani (Project Manager, Bookmarks, and more)
• Tyler Leonhardt (PowerShell)
• Taras Novak (Data Preview and more)
• Peter Pezaris (CodeStream)
• Yuki Ueda (R and more)

Issues

Here are the issues tracking the features, bugs, etc that came up during the call.

• Pre-release extension support in the marketplace — Allow extensions to publish beta releases and users to opt-in to them #15756
• Webviews in the sidebar — Support WebViews in extension contributed custom views #83911
• Pinned tabs — Add option to pin tabs similar to Visual Studio #12622
• Hover/Clickable gutters — Expose glyphMargin support to extensions #47559, [decorations] Support hover decorations over the line numbers (i.e. gutter) #28080
• Create a data science "working group" — Create a data science "working group" #94740
• Provide UI component toolkit — Provide a UI component toolkit for WebViews #94741
• 🐛 Funny behavior between auto-closing pairs and snippets autoClosingPairs in language-configuration.json doesn't allow multiple entries that use quotes. #58619
• Unit testing extensions is quite difficult — Unit testing extensions is quite difficult #94746
• Provide a telemetry story for extensions — Provide a telemetry story for extensions #94748
• Allow extensions to contribute to the VS Code welcome page — Allow extensions to contribute to the VS Code welcome page #94750
• Provide linting for extension APIs — Provide linting support (eslint?) for deprecated extension APIs #94751

Marketplace

• Dashboard stats — Dashboard stats for extension authors #94744
• Reviews & ratings — A better rating system for extensions #92377, Find a better way to deal with low star "reviews" without comment #94743
• Update featured extensions more often — Update featured extensions more often #94745

Documentation

• Provide "links" from our extension API docs to sample usage — Provide "links" from our extension API docs to sample usage #94747

Looking forward to next month!

P.S. Extension authors — join our community run VS Code Developer Community Slack 😄

[ppezaris]

Thanks to @eamodio and team for hosting! It was a fun and productive conversation. Glad to be a part of it.

[alefragnani]

Yeah, it was a great event! Looking forward the next one.

[alefragnani]

@eamodio ,

Another issue to link to the topic "Hover/Clickable gutters" is #5455. I created it sometime ago 😬

Thank you

[ppezaris]

@eamodio it would be awesome to be able to "close the loop" and be able to track the issues that were raised in this call, to be able to judge the effectiveness of the meetings and whether they were able to bring attention to the critical issues facing extension authors.

[idoprz]

Is there any call in May? Will be happy to participate in.

[eamodio]

@ppezaris All of the issues raised in the call are tracked above, each linked to their own issue -- so you can definitely track them there. As for any more "closing of the loop", what would you be looking for?

@idoprz Sign up here for the April call: #96927

[ppezaris]

The call was great -- don't get me wrong -- but my hope coming out of that meeting was that there would be an outcome that had more teeth than "we made a list of the issues raised."

For example, if there was any discussion or activity within the vscode team about the call, and if the discussion had a positive impact on planning or prioritization, it would be great to surface that information somehow, as a positive reinforcement loop.

If on the other hand the purpose of the meeting is to just create another list of issues, that's cool too -- but I guess I was hoping that something more concrete would come out of it.

[eamodio]

While I can't really offer any concrete "teeth" outside of tracking issues and championing them — which I am definitely doing. At the same time, I believe I can confidently say that the call has definitely had an impact on planning.

For example, the following are all in-progress in one stage or another (some in spec/planning, others in implementation)

• Dashboard stats — Dashboard stats for extension authors #94744
• Pre-release extension support in the marketplace — Allow extensions to publish beta releases and users to opt-in to them #15756
• Pinned tabs — Add option to pin tabs similar to Visual Studio #12622
• Provide UI component toolkit — Provide a UI component toolkit for WebViews #94741

And all of the other issues have been raised up and reviewed.

To be clear, I don't want "just another list of issues" — I want to create a space where we can hear/see/feel what the community really wants or needs. Hopefully, that will help foster more internal champions and influence planning and direction. I also want to put people and faces to the issues, to "feel" the pain/wants/needs more acutely than in an textual issue — to help foster a better richer community. On that point, we had other members of the VS Code team listening into the call (and I'm sure others watched it after the fact), as well as members from the marketplace team.

Although, at the same time, just because the community wants or needs something doesn't make it happen (or happen quickly even if we agree), it has to align with team goals, priorities, effort, etc. But the better we understand (truly understand) the needs and wants of the community we will be much better equipped to help provide them.

I would also point back to the goals of these calls outlined here: #91714. The above is one of the main goals, while the other is early feedback on proposed APIs. And this next call (#96927) will be diving into some of that.

I hope that makes sense and helps.

[prashantvc]

We have enabled the basic stats report for the extension authors on the VS Marketplace.
You can access it from the extension's More Actions... menu

We will evolve the report based on the community feedback. Please give it a try and share your feedback