I recently started a new Electron Typescript project using version 1.14 of VSCode. Getting the task runner up and running using CTRL+B did not initially work, due to the fact that tasks.json is auto-generated as version 2.0.0 compared to version 0.1.0 which was the default in VSCode 1.13.

In addition, the new VSCode supports task auto-detection which confused the hell out of me due to it detecting tsconfig.json and asking me if I wanted to compile some typescript, even though my Tasks.json file was not yet created.

Apparently, MS added task-auto detection to the mainline during my vacation rendering tasks.json as an optionel part of a VSCode project. tasks.json is still required if one wish to create custom tasks or scan and parse the auto-detected tasks shell output.

This feature is great! since now I can make all my tasks in NPM without having to re-define them in tasks.json. VSCode can now detect these tasks automagically.

Although I still have to add the tasks in tasks.json if I want to define the default task addition to allowing VSCode to scan for problems.

I recently had some issues with vscode and its TypeScript debugger when trying to read the content of the this variable. The debugger printout of the value of a variable when hovering above the variable - but the this variable was undefined.

I believed it was my closures that were not correct, thus making me replace all my functions with fat arrows. This was however not the case, since the application ran perfectly in node.

The issue turned out to be that this was not correctly source-mapped to _this. Recall that this within a TypeScript class is compiled to _this such that calling context issues are avoided. The debugger however failed to grasp the concept, making the mouse-over fail.

One has to manually expand the Closure in the debugger tab in vscode and look for _this if within a fat arrow calling context.