Intellisense improvements in Visual Studio Code

Published
Wednesday, 21 February 2018
Category
Announcement
Author
mholo65

Intellisense improvements

In case you missed it, intellisense support for Cake files in Visual Studio Code was announced a couple of months ago. Since then, we have actively been working on improving it, and the v1.14.0 release of C# for Visual Studio Code comes with some Cake specific improvements we'd like to share with you. In the v1.28.0 release notes for Omnisharp-Roslyn we can read the following:

Improvements to the Cake bakery resolver to resolve from both OmniSharp options and PATH. (PR: #1047)

This was one of the most requested features regarding intellisense support. Previously, intellisense support was dependent on Cake.Bakery being present inside the tools folder in your workspace. With this fix, you can simply install Cake.Bakery wherever you want and just specify the path to Cake.Bakery.exe using the OmniSharp Configuration System. The following steps will tell OmniSharp to use a globally installed Cake.Bakery:

  1. Install Cake.Bakery globally (replace <global_path> with the path of your choice).
nuget.exe install Cake.Bakery -OutputDirectory <global_path> -ExcludeVersion
  1. Create a file called omnisharp.json in %USERPROFILE%/.omnisharp/ (~/.omnisharp/ if you are on Linux/macOS, and make sure to use double backslashes (\) on Windows) with the following content (replace <global_path> with the path you chose in the previous step):
{
  "cake": {
    "bakeryPath": "<global_path>/Cake.Bakery/tools/Cake.Bakery.exe"
  }
}
  1. Start Visual Studio Code and start editing your .cake files.

To further improve this feature, we are also looking into distributing Cake.Bakery via both Chocolatey, Homebrew and plan old Zip-files/ tarballs.

Ensure that the Cake.Core assembly is not locked on disk when loading the host object type. (PR: #1044)

This fix, along with the previous, will make sure no files in your workspace are actually getting locked while providing intellisense. I.e. no more errors when trying to clean tools folder while Visual Studio Code is open.

Watch added/removed .cake-files and update workspace accordingly. (PR: #1054)

Previously, when adding .cake files to the workspace you would not get intellisense for those files unless you restarted the omnisharp server. This fix will automatically watch for any added, removed or renamed .cake files and update the Roslyn workspace accordingly, thus removing the need for restarting the omnisharp server.

Updated Cake.Scripting.Transport dependencies to 0.2.0 in order to improve performance when working with Cake files. (PR: #1057)

This fix brings significant performance boost when editing .cake files. Unfortunately, this fix also introduced a breaking change. So after updating to v1.13.0 of the C# for Visual Studio Code extension, please make sure v0.2.0 or newer of Cake.Bakery is installed.