InterSystems Studio is deprecated, starting with 2023.2
InterSystems is committed to providing a high quality developer experience including a great IDE (Integrated Developer Experience). For the past several years we have been evolving Visual Studio Code's ObjectScript tooling in parallel with our long-standing IDE, InterSystems Studio. There have been over 46,000 downloads of the VSCode-ObjectScript plugin, and the feedback from developers is that this is a great developer experience, and now superior to InterSystems Studio.
With our 2023.2 release we are deprecating InterSystems Studio (deprecated designates a feature or technology that InterSystems no longer actively develops, and for which better options exist). We will continue to maintain, release, and support InterSystems Studio for quite some time, and we appreciate that it is still an important tool for some customers. However, customers should be advised that we are not investing in it. Our focus is on VSCode.
I've appreciated all the customer input as we've grown our ecosystem of VS Code extensions, keeping them open source while offering full support, and maintaining regular and rapid release cycles.As we continue this journey, I look forward to continuing to hear your feedback, ideas, and code.
Feel free to comment below or direct message me. As always, your voice plays a major role in this important process.
Comments
Will you miss some things?
Now working 20 years with Studio I'm kind of "married" knowing all good and bad features.
I dislike the idea to face a "forced divorce". Dictated from outside.
It smells like very bad times in past. The opposite of freedom of decision.
some context about me.. I've been working with InterSystems technologies since 1991 so I've been thru all of the changes for the past 32 years. Unless you give it a chance you won't have an opportunity to see what are the good features in VS code.
and just today spotted https://blog.postman.com/introducing-the-postman-vs-code-extension/ . This isn't full formed as they report
We will continuously ship features and improvements—such as support for Postman Collections and environments—so be on the lookout. We value your input, so if you have any feedback on this beta version, please feel free to leave it in the comments.
but just one more example why measured on the whole VS Code really is a better environment IMHO.
I've also used Studio for 20+ years. I can still remember how much better it was than what we had before. We can all still use Studio if we want; it's not a forced divorce. But we hope that VS Code -- ObjectScript's features will make you comfortable enough to decide to do a conscious uncoupling. And as Frank Sinatra sang: "Love's much lovelier, the second time around." And he could have sung that at the Diplomat Hotel in Fort Lauderdale in 1974, where coincidentally InterSystems is hosting our Global Summit this year!
There is no doubt that working with VSCode is more productive than working with ISC Studio. I've been working with ISC Cache since 1997 and thank God ISC finally has a normal development IDE. But there are small things that need to be fine-tuned:
1. When overriding, be able to include the original implementation as well
2. The terminal cannot process Home End keys, etc., and it throws lines.
3. Close automatically opened routines/classes when debugging is finished
4. In the debug console, the zwrite option
5. Option to switch from read only file to edit file on GIT disk
6. Debugging INT source codes does not work well
7. jump to label+offset
and a lot of little things will certainly appear.
Maybe the problem is that I'm still working on Ensemble 2018
Josef
Hi @Josef Zvonicek, I'm glad that VS Code is making you more productive, and thanks for the feedback. I have some comments about your fine-tuning list:
- The "override class members" functionality is implemented by the Language Server extension. If you file an issue on its GitHub repository I would be happy to consider this enhancement request.
- The VS Code integrated terminal is part of the core product, and not our extensions, so I'm not sure we can do anything about this. Can you provide more details about how you started the terminal and the expected vs actual behavior?
- Newer versions of the vscode-objectscript extension should avoid opening that extra copy of the file when debugging. If you're using recent version like 2.8.0 or 2.8.1 and this isn't working, please file a GitHub issue in that extension's repository and I will take a look at it.
- The debug console can only evaluate expressions. It's not a full terminal and cannot execute commands, so this isn't possible unfortunately.
- I'm not sure what a GIT disk is. Are you editing files on your local file system?
- Can you describe what doesn't work well, and what we could do to make things better?
- There is a command called "Open Error Location..." that you can execute from the command palette. It prompts you to enter a "label+offset^routine" string and then opens that location. It only works for INT routines though.
With #2 (at least for me anyway), the issue seems to be related to running iris session when using the Windows version of ssh.exe (called from VS Code, configured in settings under node terminal.integrated.profiles.windows). Home and End work normally at the Linux shell prompt, but when running iris session the effect is that either key produces the same result as pressing the Enter key. The current command is executed and a new IRIS prompt is generated.
It doesn't seem to be a VS Code problem so much as an ISC problem, at least on Windows.
For me it's a horrible news 😭 I really prefer to use Studio when explaining how to create properties (particularly relationships) and queries (particularly Class Queries based on COS) to students who see IRIS for the first and the last time during my classes. And when something goes wrong (and it does a lot of the time) it's usually easier to ask them to delete the code that produces error and rewrite it while I'm looking than to figure out what's wrong with it. And if it something more complicated than simple properties it can take a lot of time.
Besides, not all students know (and want/need to learn) how to use VS Code and look for proper plug-ins, extensions etc. It will really make my life that much harder.
one of my (former) customers suggested this approach:
- Train COS not on IRIS but on some Caché/ENS 2018 instances with Studio
- or on some older IRIS version
- As they run pure COS they have Studio for Training. An no need of new features
- once all the logic works they may move the result to some final IRIS
(if ever they migrated)
Please, give VSCode a try.
Regarding of extensions, you can give students a repository with .vscode/extensions.json, that will already contain examples. E.g. here is how my extensions.json looks like:
{
"recommendations": [
"eamodio.gitlens",
"georgejames.gjlocate",
"github.copilot",
"intersystems-community.servermanager",
"intersystems-community.sqltools-intersystems-driver",
"intersystems-community.vscode-objectscript",
"intersystems.language-server",
"mohsen1.prettify-json",
"ms-azuretools.vscode-docker",
"ms-python.python",
"ms-python.vscode-pylance",
"ms-vscode-remote.remote-containers"
]
}This will not install extensions automatically, but they will be shown as recommended for the workspace, like that:
Here is the template they can start from and here is an example extensions.json file.
@Iryna Mykhailova please also look at VS Code's recently-introduced Profiles feature. I imagine this could be useful in learning contexts.
Maybe my VS Code setup isn't correct, but if I need to explore % class files to learn more about behavior of some methods (let's face it, the documentation isn't always revealing), I use Studio. A recent example was learning what methods of %CSP.Page I could override and which order the override-ed methods were called in the code.
I know in the past I've referenced other things. It's not often but it's helpful when we can. I haven't found a way to view % classes in VS Code.
Maybe someone can help me if that's something I've missed!
Hi @Michael Davidovich, I can show you how to configure VS Code to see system classes. Are you using client-side or server-side editing?
@Brett Saviano
Sorry I didn't see this until just now. We are editing on client-side.
@Michael.Davidovichyou might find this extension useful for exploring inherited methods etc:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=georgejames.objects…
One quick/dirty(?) way is to do a "View Code in Namespace" for "%SYS". Under the %SYS namespace the percent classes are not filtered out.
Readers of this thread may be interested in this discussion I just started about the export/import topic:
https://community.intersystems.com/post/studio-vs-code-migration-addres…