Announcing the Deprecation of the Azure Tools for Visual Studio Code

A few months ago I let the community know that I'd be deprecating some features from the Azure Tools for Visual Studio Code. Some amazing new extensions have appeared in the Azure category of the Visual Studio Marketplace that make it easy and fun to party with Azure. With the great work that's getting done by folks in the Visual Studio Code Azure Tools team, I think it's safe to say that full deprecation is in order.

Why? What's the deal?

To make it as short and sweet as possible, I don't want to confuse anyone who is looking in the marketplace for the real Azure tools. This extension has been in the marketplace for a long time, and as a result of frequent updates at our beginning, we've had a great running and our download count has gotten pretty great. We wholly appreciate the great feedback, contributions, and issues we've received on the extension.

I started this extension with a few goals:

1. Learn more about the Node.js SDK.
2. Use the Node.js SDK with the VS Code extensibility API.
3. Have a tool I could use to do things I have to do frequently when I'm building stuff in Azure.

The extension definitely gave an opportunity for those learnings, but it also introduced a lot of folks to developing with Azure within VS Code. Since those early beginnings there's been a huge set of investments in enabling Azure developer experiences within VS Code, and I want to make sure customers don't stumble onto our humble beginnings and miss out on the true awesomeness of the official Azure extensions.

When?

I'll remove the extension from the marketplace on April 27th, 2018.

What's Next Here?

Simply - nothing. The original extension's repository will remain intact so developers can learn from the code or clone-and-package it on your own using the VSCE tools for packaging and publishing your own extensions.

Again - thanks for your use of the extension, contributions, and ideas. Please take my advice, try out the new and official extensions for App Service, Cosmos DB, mssql, Azure Functions, IoT - all of it! Happy coding!