publish-extensions VS free-vscode-csharp

The biggest caveat would be to be aware of the default connexion to an alternative extension store, https://open-vsx.org, instead of Microsoft's own store, which does not have all the extensions the official store has. But that's less and less an issue, thanks to projects such as https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions. In the worst case, I just manually `git clone`d the desired extension in my local extension folder. Nothing to complain about otherwise

Hey folks, Geoff here from Gitpod. Very please to see there continues to be interest in open (and FOSS) software development tooling. VSCodium uses the OpenVSX registry (which Gitpod folks created) because the VS Market place is proprietary and can only be connected to from offical Visual Studio branded products.

If you can't find an extension when using VSCodium then please send a pull-request to this repository https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions with the identifier and that will help grow the ecosystem of open tooling.

ICMYI - We blogged more about this over at https://www.gitpod.io/blog/openvscode-server-launch, https://www.gitpod.io/blog/cloud-ide-history and https://www.gitpod.io/blog/open-vsx.

Create a pull request to this repository to have the @open-vsx service account publish the extensions for you. It appears that they run a batch job to keep them up-to-date.

Geoff here from Gitpod. Solid write up and overview here. Some minor clarifications and helpful pointers!

There’s a community WIP pull request open right now to add Gitea support.

The visual studio marketplace is proprietary (by design) and as such we created OpenVSX for the open source ecosystem then gifted it to the eclipse foundation. If you see something not in OpenVSX send the pull request here https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions

And, finally, Open source communities are eligible for complimentary plan upgrades to unlimited hours. https://www.gitpod.io/blog/gitpod-for-opensource

Send a PR to https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions

> One goal of Open VSX is to have extension maintainers publish their extensions according to the documentation. However, you may be missing specific extensions that have not been published by their maintainers: either they are not willing to do it, or they haven't found time to do it, or simply they haven't heard about Open VSX yet. Though the preferred solution for such a situation is to convince the maintainers to start publishing themselves, you can add the extensions here to have them published by our CI workflow.

👋🧡 Geoff from Gitpod here. Thanks for your support. OpenVSX was created by Gitpod/TypeFox and gifted to the Eclipse Foundation to resolve the problem that the Visual Studio Marketplace is proprietary. Extensions can be configured to automatically be published via sending a pull-request to https://github.com/open-vsx/publish-extensions

The auto-publishing of the extension is failing, due to a misconfiguration of versions in it's package.json.

My third point addresses the FLOSS extensions not yet available on Open VSX. These can usually be added fairly easily via open-vsx/publish-extensions, or by asking the extension author to publish to Open VSX themselves. I believe this mindset is the only way in which FLOSS distributions of VS Code can ever be a viable alternative to Visual Studio Code.

I only tried F# for few days, but it was a pleasant experience on both macos and linux.

dotnet CLI should take care of build process, it can even generate self-sufficient executable (that bundle parts of .NET in them). The infamous required XML boilerplate has also been cut down to near-zero.

My biggest gripe is that Microsoft's debugger is closed-source and proprietary (though free for users of official VSCode builds). There is open-source netcoredbg by Samsung, so you can use VSCod[e,ium] with https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp , but YMMV.

When looking into C# tools though, my understanding is that the main debugging tool is under a proprietary MS license, although maybe I'm misunderstanding that. My question is, is there a FOSS debugger or tool kit for C# development? I did find this on the marketplace but am not sure if this is what I'm looking for. I know this is a bit of a niche case but was hoping to clarify. I'm not committed to VSCodium and am open to other text editors/IDEs, although would prefer to stick with it if possible.

My understanding is that I can install VSCodium and that they have many of the most popular extensions available. They even seem to have an alternative for the C# debugger. I could also use VSCodium and manually install the Microsoft extensions from the distributed VSX files.

and there is a VSCode extension that uses this instead of the MS debugger

https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp

C# language (powered by OmniSharp): Official C# language support. The extension is subject to this restrictive license because it uses Microsoft's proprietary debugger. The source code is available under a MIT license. See this comment in the C# extension repo for some discussion on this. There is an alternative version of the C# extension in the Open VSX Registry that uses Samsung’s MIT-licensed Debugger.

Yeah, Gitpod is pretty nice for what it is. Although it's worth mentioning that certain proprietary Microsoft extensions are licensed for use only in Microsoft distributions of VSCode, so they won't work in Gitpod. Most extensions do work, but Pylance, C#, C/C++ doesn't, to name a few exceptions. Although for C# there is a FOSS extension you can use instead and for C/C++ there is clangd.

I'm not very familiar with C# and .NET, so I can't help you with any specifics. But I do know that Microsoft actively prevent the usage of their proprietary extensions such as the one for C# in non-Microsoft distributions of VS Code, such as VSCodium. Although if you're using VSCodium, you've probably installed the alternative FOSS version of the C# extension, unless you've sideloaded the official C# extension?

For C# there is https://github.com/muhammadsammy/free-omnisharp-vscode for Python there is https://github.com/Microsoft/pyright (Pylance is the proprietary counterpart) for C++ there is https://github.com/clangd/vscode-clangd

If you want to stay FOSS, you can use this fork of the C# plugin which uses a free debugger: https://github.com/muhammadsammy/free-omnisharp-vscode

The download URL for the debugger seems to have changed, but the latest version of the extension should include a fix for that (see muhammadsammy/free-omnisharp-vscode#20).