Announcing Update 6
Today I’m happy to announce the release of Update 6 (version 60128.14) for the Tools for Apache Cordova in Visual Studio. Here is the URL for the download:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=723751
Installing Update 6 from the above link will work on both Visual Studio RTM and Update 1. However, installing VS TACO Update 6 from the VS notification center will require VS Update 1
Visual Studio will display a notification for the update early next week.
What’s New?
This is a smaller update than Update 5, but we have two new features which we’re excited to release. We think both of these will solve some common customer problems.
Local iOS deploy
We’ve been working on this one for a long time. You can now attach a tethered iOS device to your Windows machine, and with a little bit
of configuration (see here for a detailed walk-through) you can
launch and debug Cordova apps on an iOS device. The previous workflow required you to deploy to an i-device through iTunes on a Mac, but now you can deploy straight from Visual Studio on Windows (although you still need iTunes for Windows to recognize your device). Check out our previous blog post for more info.
Use sandboxed version of NPM
As we announced a few weeks ago, we recently discovered that certain
versions of NPM fail to install our tooling. Unfortunately, the version of NPM that’s bundled with the latest ‘stable’ version of Node
is one of these versions.
To fix the problem and insulate us from future volatility, we now pull down a specific version of NPM that we know works and use that version to bootstrap our tooling. We hope that this fixes many of the errors customers are seeing when building projects for the first time.
Bug Fixes
As usual, Update 6 contains a number of bug fixes. Here are the highlights of what’s included:
Ripple deploy / attach issues
We were finally able to track down a number of lingering issues with Ripple and we hope these fixes help it become more reliable. In particular,
we found one problem where Ripple wouldn’t attach because of a timing issue. We’ve fixed that in Update 6
and we expect this will solve a lot of common problems using Ripple as a debug target.
We also fixed a problem due to interactions with the Chrome dev tools, and another issue where Ripple connection would fail when launching for the second time.
New projects from existing code now builds for Windows-x86
There are some commonly used projects that now build correctly for the Windows-x86 platform.
Special folders are shown in solution explorer
We had a few cases where folders (such as node_modules and .git) were showing up in the solution explorer.
Wrong message on a failed remote build
In some cases, remote iOS builds were reporting some very confusing and misleading error messages. We’ve made a few improvements that should make these errors clearer.
vs:plugin elements are not “pulled forward” if they are already installed
We focused on CLI interop in update 5. As part of that we changed some legacy logic in the config
designer to write the <plugin> element instead of <vs:plugin>. There were some cases however, when we weren’t updating config.xml properly and were leaving the old elements. That’s been fixed.
Feedback and Thanks
As always, please send us your feedback! We’ll see you in three weeks.
Michael Braude
Development Manager | Tools for Apache Cordova
mbraude@microsoft.com | @LittleWebFoot