Issue #74  (Extension Sponsors)09/20/23

In case you missed it, in May of 2022 the VS Code team announced that VS Code extensions can now be sponsored, or funded to provide extension authors with incentive to continue updating and maintaining their extensions.

Initially the "Sponsor" option was shown in the bottom right area of an extension's marketplace details page. At some point the button was moved to the top right area, next to the star rating.
 
In order to take advantage of this feature, extension developers can add the following to their extension's package.json file, which is how you "opt in" to sponsorship:
 

The URL can be any link to the developer's sponsor page on GitHub, Open Collective, or elsewhere. There's no actual sponsorship functionality built in here, it's just a link to an external website where users can consider funding the project.

From what I can tell, it seems like very few extensions include this, so it might be good to make this a little more known. Of course, in many cases, extensions have other ways they receive funding or the developers are more than happy to continue maintaining their extensions as a free side project.

But I do believe it's good for extension authors to know this, as it helps motivate them to continue fixing issues and adding updates to improve their extensions.

Now on to this week's hand-picked links!
 

VS Code Tools

VSCodium — Not a new project, but this is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s VS Code (i.e. without the telemetry and tracking).

Next.Nav — VS Code extension that allows you to navigate and create routes easily in your Next.js application.

Seamless Project, Seamless Talent! — With Toptal, you don't just hire freelancers; you partner with industry experts. Say goodbye to prolonged hiring processes and hello to instant matches with the top 3% talent pool.  Sponsor 

Diff Folders — VS Code extension to compare two folders.

VS Code Articles

Leveraging VS Code Extensions for Initial Access — A deep dive into the security and potential vulnerability of VS Code extensions.

How to Create, Publish, and Optimize Your VS Code Extension for Marketplace Success — An article that more or less amounts to a checklist of instructions for creating, testing, packaging, and publishing your VS Code extensions.

Hal9: ChatGPT for Enterprise Databases — Chat with your enterprise databases using secure generative AI and empower business users in your team to do their own data analyses in seconds.   Sponsor 

Why I Switched From Visual Studio Code to JetBrains WebStorm (IntelliJ) — This article is from 2019, with some author comments posted in May of this year. Interesting to see an older viewpoint that, to some extent, still holds water in the author's mind (at least for client projects).

Best of the Rest

flow-view — An interacive visual editor for dataflow programming. The result can be downloaded as JSON and there are a few prebuilt examples.

Emacs Bedrock — An extremely minimal Emacs starter kit uses just one external package by default, and only GNU-ELPA packages on an opt-in basis.

RustRover — A brand new, feature-rich JetBrains IDE for Rust developers, with timely support, regular updates, and an out-of-the-box experience.

Suggestions?

If you have any link suggestions, including a tool, article, or other resources related to VS Code or another IDE, send it via DM on X: @LouisLazaris or just hit reply on this email.

That's it for this issue.

Happy VS Coding!
Louis
VSCode.Email
@LouisLazaris