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!

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/

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/

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/

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/