I’m excited to share that SAP Business Application Studio (BAS), is now using Code-OSS, the open source used to build Microsoft VS Code, and one of the most loved IDE’s in the market, as its new Platform IDE.

With this change, we can now offer a richer and better user experience for all our customers.

In this blog, I want to share with you the motivation and advantages of this strategic change and dive into the changes you should expect to see in BAS since our release on November 6.

Let’s start  🙂

BAS was released in 2020, and since then until this latest release, it used the Eclipse Theia open-source platform. Theia has served us well, but it presented some challenges. It was not 100% compatible with VS Code API, which lead to a decline in community contributions to the open source, and increased our maintenance responsibility for the Theia IDE significantly. When Code-OSS introduced server support (which BAS required to adopt this open source), we decided it was time for a change. (Actually, to be accurate, we’re not using Code-OSS directly in BAS, but Open VS Code Server, which offers some additional capabilities. You can read more about it here.)

There are a lot of advantages we considered, mainly:

• Code-OSS is the Microsoft open source for Visual Studio Code. This means that BAS is now 100% compatible with VS Code API, and that any VS Code extension can be installed in BAS and should work out of the box.
• The VS Code community is much bigger, which means we will be able to provide more in less time to BAS customers.
• VS Code is more common, and developers all over the world are familiar with the user experience it provides, so the experience in BAS will be consistent with what they already know and love, while still enjoying the advantages that BAS offers – unique tools to simplify the connectivity and the development of SAP business applications.

So what should you expect?

You don’t need to actively do anything to get BAS with Code-OSS. The first time you open any of your dev spaces (after the release of BAS with Code-OSS), it will automatically be updated.

The content of your dev space will of course stay the same.

If you configured your settings in BAS, you should be aware that some settings may not be valid anymore. All valid settings will be saved for you automatically.

Once you enter your workspace, you will immediately see some of the new features:

• A new header that includes the command center from which you can perform a search or run commands. You can also navigate back and forth between the open editors you used. (In the future it might not be presented by default, but you’ll be able to configure it according to your preferences)
  
• You can control the entire layout of BAS by choosing one of the available options, or by configuring a new layout according to your preferences.
  
• We changed the look and feel of the Get Started page, and, in the future, we plan to offer more capabilities to it to help developers get started with the development of their applications.
  

Some additional commonly used features that worth mentioning are:

• The terminal supports different profiles you can select from (bash, dash, etc.). Also, it is now much easier to manage multiple open tabs from the right panel which replaces the scroll-bar option that was available before.
  
• We added some useful links: You can now report an issue (open a support ticket), ask a question (post a question in the community) from the Help menu or give us your feedback by clicking the link on the status bar.
• You can now define the default custom editor for each type of file. The custom editor will be used when opening the file with default actions. (For example, from the file explorer, problems view etc.)
• You can install any extension available via the VSX Open registry and, as I already mentioned, it should work out of the box. Since not all extensions are available via this registry, you also have the option to install any .vsix manually.
  Please note that you must ensure that you have and maintain all the necessary rights to use these extensions and that you are responsible for all aspects of these extensions.

There are many more features included in this version, but I won’t be able to cover them all in this blog… If you want to get the full list, you can follow the VS Code release notes and the BAS what’s new page.

I hope you enjoyed this blog and I invite you to take the time to explore the latest version of BAS, and of course to share your feedback with us.

Happy Coding! 🙂