Visual Studio Code 1.74 boosts remote development

With newly released Visual Studio Code 1.74, the Microsoft-developed code editor introduces a remote tunneling capability that allows developers to securely connect to their VS Code machine from any device anywhere. Remote tunnels is a preview feature.

VS Code 1.74, also identified as the November 2022 release, was announced December 7. The remote tunnels preview feature allows developers to establish a secure connection to a remote VS Code machine using vscode.dev or the Remote – Tunnels extension from within VS Code desktop. With remote tunnels, a secure connection does not require setting up SSH (Secure Shell).

Remote tunnels can be turned on in VS Code 1.74 from the Account menu or the command palette, or by running code tunnel from a machine with VS Code installed and on the PATH, or by downloading the new VS Code CLI and running ./code tunnel.

Elsewhere in VS Code 1.74, the JavaScript debugger now supports console.profile, which records a performance profile. When running under the debugger, a CPU profile will be collected for code between console.profile() and consoleprofileEnd(). The resulting file will be saved in a workspace folder and can be viewed by VS Code’s profile viewer.

Developers can download Visual Studio Code for Windows, macOS, or Linux from the project website. Other highlights of VS Code 1.74:

• Merge editor improvements and bug fixes. Undo/Redo now tracks the handled state of conflicts, Ignore actions in the input views now can be used to accept the base version instead of the “Mark as handled” action in the result view, and changes that are equal on both sides of the merge editor now are automatically resolved.
• Trying to open a potentially unsafe Git repo now will produce a welcome view in the source control view as well as an error. VS Code uses git.exe for executing Git repos. Starting with Git 2.35.2, users are prevented from running Git operations in a repo that is in a folder owned by a user other than the current user, as the repo is deemed potentially unsafe.
• A new explorer.autoRevealExclude setting lets users configure which files are autorevealed in the Explorer if autorevealing is enabled.
• Audio cues now are provided for when notebook cells finish running.
• Indicators, hovers, and links in the Settings editor now are navigable by keyboard.
• JavaScript and TypeScript now support running Go to Definition on the return keyword to quickly jump to the top of the function returned from. This helps when dealing with long, complicated, or highly nested functions.
• VS Code now ships with TypeScript 4.9.

The October 2022 VS Code release, version 1.73, brought improvements to the Command Center and the merge editor and introduced Dev Container templates and new Python extensions.