We’ve delivered another update to the Visual Studio Online “Monaco” experience this month, focused on improving the quality of the client experience as well as fixing a number of bugs detected by our users. Many of these fixes will be seamless, but we wanted to showcase some of the more noticeable improvements you will encounter.
TypeScript
Typescript now has the option to “Go to type definition” in the context menu, which allows you to jump directly to where a type is defined.
Here we call a function but want to look at the properties available on the returned object. With “Go to type definition” we can immediately jump to the type:
Markdown
Markdown preview now supports relative paths for embedded images and CSS files.
JSON
JSON files can now be formatted from the context menu.
Will be formatted as:
Node.JS
The team did some app building this month to discover ways to make our getting started experience for Node.JS applications even smoother. You may notice some new warnings in the output window when your site isn’t configured properly, such as an invalid handler in your web.config:
The recommended way to get up and running with an Express-backed Node.JS site is as follows:
1. npm -g install express
2. express -f .
3. npm install
4. Use the “Run” action from the activity bar on the left to automatically generate a web.config file.
We also now allow usage of “npm install -g" to globally install commands for a site and can remember settings stored with “npm config”.
PowerShell
You can now run PowerShell scripts from the editor or using the context menu in the explore viewlet:
Thanks!
Please give the new build a try and give us feedback so we can continue to improve!