Open Sourcing the Java Debugger for Visual Studio Code

Xiaokai He

Since we first released our Java Debugger extension for Visual Studio Code on September 28, it quickly became the most trending extension of the month. And of course, lots of feedback and suggestions were submitted from our active developer community. You shared, we listened. In this quick follow up release, we’re open sourcing both our Java Debugger Extension as well as the backend Java Debug Server, along with publishing a few feature improvements and bug fixes. Please try our latest Java debugger extension and make Visual Studio Code a better place for Java developers together.

No need to specify main class anymore

We have added a new feature to automatically resolve main class of the project, you no longer need to fill these values manually.

Fully supported external source files

With this feature, you can now also debug with third-party classes, when the source code is inside a JAR or a source attachment. And you can also set breakpoint in those classes ahead of debugging.

Other changes

This new release also includes the following updates

1. We have adopted to the new Visual Studio Code Debug protocol.
2. This latest release displays stackframe name with format ClassName.MethodName(ParameterList).
3. There are improvements in the call stack display info for files without sources.
4. Bug fixes.

You can find more details in our changelog.

Try it out

If you’re trying to find a performant editor for your Java project, please try this extension and let us know what you think.

• Install and try the Java Extension Pack for Visual Studio Code.
• Check out the new open sourced Java Debugger Extension and Java Debug Server repositories.
• Learn more about Java on Visual Studio Code.
• You can submit a bug or feature request to Java Debugger Extension and participant community driven Gitter channel for discussion.