What's New in RokuCommunity: July-Oct 2023

Hey everyone,

Welcome to the combined July-October edition of “What’s new in RokuCommunity”. I had hoped to send this out sooner (and more frequently), but a few months ago I discovered a fairly significant bug in our what’s-new generator script. We had to take some time to fix the script before we could finish these writeups, while still also maintaining all the RokuCommunity projects.

A lot of awesome things happened at RokuCommunity the past few months. We made significant progress on type validation in the BrighterScript project, completely rewrote most of the under-the-hood logic for the debug protocol debugger, released @rokucommunity/promises, adopted the brs project, and a whole lot more. We also had the privilege of speaking at the 2023 Roku Developer Summit which you can check out here.

Happy reading!

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Here are some highlights from July 2023

• Overview

  • We need your help

  • Issue of the month

• Editor

  • Language server busy spinner

  • Improved BrighterScript interface Syntax highlighting

• Debugging

  • New fileLogging option for debug sessions

  • deleteDevChannelBeforeInstall install option in launch.json

  • ECP Rendezvous tracking implemented and enabled by default

• BrighterScript

  • Add project index to language server log entries

  • New --profile CLI flag for better profiling support

  • bugfix: prevent diagnostics crash on mising range

  • Plugins: New beforeProgramDispose plugin hook

  • Plugins: afterScopeCreate fixed for component creation

  • Maintenance

  • Updates in v0.66.0-alpha*

  • 0.66.0 performance fixes

  • Breaking Changes

• Documentation

  • BrighterScript Interfaces

You can read the full July 2023 update here:
https://rokucommunity.github.io/whats-new/2023-07-July/

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Here are some highlights from August 2023

• Overview

  • We need your help

  • Issue of the month

You can read the full August 2023 update here:
https://rokucommunity.github.io/whats-new/2023-08-August/

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Here are some highlights from September 2023

• Overview

  • We need your help

  • Issue of the month

• New Projects

  • We adopted brs!

  • @rokucommunity/promises

• Editor

  • Improvements to SceneGraph Node Inspector

  • New Roku Test Automation panel

• Formatting

  • Sort imports

• BrighterScript

  • Fix tab issue when printing diagnostics

  • Print diagnostic related information

  • Don’t crash on null ranges

  • Consistent insertion of bslib.brs

  • Allow specifying bslib destination directory

  • new noproject cli flag

  • bs_const support in bsconfig.json

  • Add missing emitDefinitions to docs

  • Fix template string position bug

  • Update plugins docs

• BrighterScript Preview features

  • bslint

  • Validate class and interface method calls

  • Type casts are not allowed in BrightScript

  • Fixed a hover bug

  • Return type validation

  • Adds Typed Arrays

  • Validates DottedSetStatements for type compatibility

  • Adds Native Brightscript Component Types and Custom Components (Nodes) to Type System

  • Adds validation for binary operators

  • Add interface parameter support

  • Fixed issues with interface validations

  • BrighterScript 0.66 alpha changes for plugin authors

  • Fixed isLiteralInvalid reflection method and added other isLiteral* methods

  • Use Symbol Tables for Completions

• Thank you

You can read the full September 2023 update here:
https://rokucommunity.github.io/whats-new/2023-09-September/

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Here are some highlights from October 2023

• Overview

  • We need your help

  • Issue of the month

• Editor

  • Align device picker name with name from the devices tab

  • Enhance host picker during launch

  • Add link for ECP registry

• Debugging

  • Enable remote control on launch

  • Fix automation view crash when no config found

  • Fix that pesky “local variables” spinner in telnet

  • Debug Protocol Enhancements

  • Better compile error handling

  • Better debug session process cleanup

• Formatting

  • new color-format bslint rule to enforce specific color formats

• BrighterScript

  • BrighterScript Preview features

  • File api

  • Support overloaded methods in BrightScript interfaces

  • Adds callFunc as member method to Custom Components

  • Semantic Tokes for Native Components and Type completion in Type Expressions

  • Code completion in Type Cast/Type Expression:

  • Fixes compatibility of built in types (roArray -> typed arrays)

  • Fixes enum validation

  • Allow classes and native components in Typed Arrays

  • Improve type compatibility diagnostic messages

  • Better multi scope messages

  • Fixed some bugs in hovers

  • Wider support for as object

  • Various other type validation enhancements

  • Better diagnostic ranges for unknown dotted get expressions

  • Adds .kind prop to AstNode.

  • Breaking changes

• Thank you

You can read the full October 2023 update here:
https://rokucommunity.github.io/whats-new/2023-10-October/