Announcing Update 7
Fresh on the heels of Update 6, today I’m happy to announce the release of update 7 (version 60219.1). Here is the download URL:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=733584
What’s New?
New default Cordova version in new projects
By default, new projects are now created using Cordova 6.0.0, the latest version of Cordova. However, all your existing projects will not be upgraded, and are still supported by our tools. Read about the latest improvements made in Cordova 6.0.0 .
Consume structured error data from Cordova
We’re very excited about this feature. We know that we can do a better job surfacing error messages in the error pane, and in update 7 we’ve taken an important first step towards improving this experience.
Determining what is an ‘error’ from Cordova has been a difficult engineering challenge. We tried to solve this by picking out lines that looked like errors and reporting them in the error pane. Unfortunately, due to the wide variety of possible errors while building a Cordova project, this approach has not been particularly effective.
We’ve got a team here at Microsoft that commits regularly to Cordova, and we worked closely with them to move the error emitting logic down the stack into the runtime. Starting with version 6.0.0, Cordova now emits error messages through a well-defined API which our tools consume. This gets us out of the business of trying to be smart about what is an error and what is not. Instead, we now rely on whatever Cordova says.
You’ll get this new behavior only if you install VS TACO Update 7 and target Cordova 6.0.0 or higher. If you continue to target older versions of the CLI, you will still get the old behavior.
We do not expect the error messages to be perfect, but we hope that they are more useful than they’ve been in the past. If you see a non-actionable error message, please send me the build log and the list of errors in the output pane. Improving this experience is one of our highest priorities.
Updated Project Templates
We updated our project templates to look nicer and more modern. We also fixed a couple of small issues with the templates (for example, we changed some image assets and added some missing icons).
Bug Fixes
As usual, we have some bug fixes in this release. Here are the highlights:
vs-tac install fails if AppData path has a space in it
We heard reports of failures instaling our node package with Update 6. We found the problem occured when user names had a space in them. Thanks to those of you who reported the issue.
Reported Crashes
We’re starting to do a better job keeping up with our crash reporting system. We’ve fixed a number of bugs in this release.
Project name with spaces invalidates package.json file, breaks NPM
Adding NPM packages to a project with a name that doesn’t match NPM’s naming requirements was causing package restore to fail. We fixed this by adding “private”: “true” to the package.json.
Store packaging for multiple architectures only copies one package file to AppPackages directory
You could not previously create packages for the Windows store with multiple architectures at the same time.
Feedback and Thanks
As I mentioned earlier, we are particularly interested in your feedback for this release - especially around error reporting. Please let me know what you think!
Michael Braude
Development Manager | Tools for Apache Cordova
mbraude@microsoft.com | @LittleWebFoot