The VSCode C# Extension build process follows the VS Code docs and runs tests directly inside of its repo root. This unfortunately gives a false sense of security because bugs can be introduced during VSIX packaging [particularly due to missing content in node_modules or excluded via .vscodeignore].
This change addresses this problem by moving our CI tests to execute the VSIX instead of the build's intermediate artifacts. Specifically:
build the vsix
unpackage the vsix
instrument the unpackaged vsix
run tests with VS Code Host pointing to the unpackaged vsix
This makes our CI tests ~= to the user's runtime experience and will greatly help us with size reduction efforts.
To support this change, I also moved our build system from package.json to Gulp. This makes the build scripts significantly easier to understand, provides intellisense for build scripts, and build-time type checking for their contents.
I also strengthened the repo's use of .vscodeignore by creating a copy of the file for each scenario [online packages and offline packages]. The new gulp packaging scripts take advantage of these files to produce packages with predictable contents regardless of when packaging occurs. [small caveat, @akshita31 will be adding a test that validates that net-new content does not start sneaking into the vsix package].
Akshita Agarwal
Ravi Chande
Piotr Puszkiewicz