Microsoft announces robust new release of Visual Studio Code

The latest version of VS Code is chock full of important updates, including a new AI Tool.

The January 2023 update to Visual Studio Code (v1.75) introduces several updates and additions, including new documentation for using AI tools in the popular, open source-based code editor.

The VS dev team at Microsoft detailed all the new aspects of the release in an official blog post this week. According to the post key highlights of the release include the availability of Profiles, which lets users create and share profiles to configure extensions, settings, shortcuts, and more. There is also an update for VS Marketplace signing, i.e., published extensions are now code signed by default.

The update features better accessibility, including improvements to diff navigation and Terminal Mode. They have added easier multi-view resizing and a tree view search history. Terminal link detection now detects links containing spaces, brackets, line and column formats.

There are new Git commands to stash staged changes and delete remote tags from within VS Code, and some “experimental” Light and Dark themes for users to try out.

New: an AI powered “code completion tool”

As of now, the new AI Tools in VS Code documentation only features one product, as introduced in the dev team’s update announcement: “We’ve also added a new AI Tools in VS Code topic to the VS Code documentation that will help you get started with Copilot.”

“The GitHub Copilot extension is an AI-powered code completion tool that helps you write code faster and smarter,” the v1.75 post explains. “You can use the Copilot extension in VS Code to generate code, or to learn from the code it generates. GitHub Copilot integrates into the VS Code editor through the inline suggestions UI, which lets you review various suggestions and easily accept all or part of the generated code.”

The Copilot extension tool in the Visual Studio Code Marketplace has been installed more than 3.5 million times. The 807 developers who reviewed it gave the extension an average 3.8 rating (scale 0-5).