Teamscale Integration for Visual Studio Code

Teamscale Integration for Visual Studio Code

The Teamscale Integration for Visual Studio Code allows for seamless browsing of quality defects found by the Teamscale software‐quality analysis server. Teamscale analyzes your source code incrementally with every commit, providing feedback on the quality of your code in near real‐time. (Note: An existing Teamscale Server is necessary to use this plugin!)

This plugin has the following features:

• Auto‐detect which branch is being used (Git & SVN) and display all data accordingly
• Display defects in the Problems panel
• Display findings next to your code
• Flag findings as tolerated or false-positive

How it works

You need a Teamscale server that analyzes your code. (We offer free licenses for open source projects.)

Once your server is set up to analyze your code repository, you need to

1. put a .teamscale.toml configuration file in your code folder: https://docs.teamscale.com/reference/teamscale-toml/. The file defines how the code in your folder corresponds to the code on a Teamscale server.
2. Configure your Teamscale user account in VS Code (add username and access key in the user settings).

Then the extension will automatically sync your code with the Teamscale Server. Use the Open File in Teamscale action to verify whether the setup worked.

Activation

The extension will be activated automatically when it's installed and your code folder contains a .teamscale.toml file.

Features

Displaying Findings on your Code

"Finding" is our name for any diagnostics our analyses detect on your source code. Since static analyses always have some corner cases where their results are not 100% correct, we use the neutral term "finding" instead of issues/smells/bugs/warnings/errors and let you decide.

This extension can display findings that are computed on the Teamscale server in your IDE.

If you enable the "on open/save" analysis option, the extension sends your code to the server whenever you switch to another text document or save it (and shows the updated findings after some seconds, depending on the analysis speed of the server).

You can always trigger the analysis manually with the Start analysis on current file command.

Enable Flagging a Finding as "Tolerated" or "False Positive"

You don't like one of the findings? If the finding is technically correct, but you prefer to not "fix" it at the moment (or ever), you can mark it as "tolerated" and it will disappear from your findings list. If the finding is just wrong and our analyses have a bug, you can mark it as "false positive". In either case, you can still review the flagged findings and the flagging rationales in a special Teamscale page later.

To access either of these actions, have a look at the "quick fix" actions of a finding/diagnostic.

Open File in Teamscale UI

The context menu of each file contains an Open File in Teamscale action. That opens the Teamscale page for the file in your web browser. The Teamscale web UI offers a lot of features and analysis results that go beyond what we can display in this VS Code extension, so please have a look at the web UI when you want some more insights on your code.

Found a Bug?

If you encounter any errors or have suggestions for improvement, please feel free open a support ticket at https://teamscale.com/support or contact us at support@teamscale.com.

Limitations

This VS Code extension can't analyze code in notebooks. Since Teamscale requires code that is mostly syntactically correct and we expect that notebooks contain a lot of code snippets for illustation (which are often not syntactically correct on their own), we do not support analysis of code in notebooks.

Troubleshooting

If the extension does not work as expected, please have a look at its output messages. Open the "Output" tab and select the "Teamscale Integration" output channel in the dropdown field. The extension will print log messages for each executed action here.

Requirements

You need a Teamscale server that analyzes your source code and a user account on that server. https://www.teamscale.com

Enjoy!